Run linting and unit testing

  • 6 minutes

GitHub Actions can be used to automate tasks triggered by events. To trigger code quality checks when a pull request is created, you'll need to:

  • Verify your code with linters and unit tests.
  • Integrate code checks with pull requests.

Verify your code

There are two common types of checks you'll want to do on your code: linters and unit tests.

You can use linters to check whether your code adheres to quality guidelines your organization has set. For example, to lint your code with Flake8, you'll create a .flake8 configuration file, which contains the rules your code has to adhere to.

To check whether the code works as expected, you can create unit tests. To easily test specific parts of your code, your scripts should contain functions. You can test functions in your scripts by creating test files. A popular tool to test Python code is Pytest.

Tip

Learn more about how to run unit tests with Pytest.

To check your code by using GitHub Actions you'll need to:

  • Install the tool (Flake8 or Pytest).
  • Run the tests by specifying the folders within your repo that need to be checked.

Tip

You can verify code automatically with GitHub Actions, or manually in Visual Studio Code. Learn more about how to verify your code locally.

Integrate code checks with pull requests.

To trigger a GitHub Actions workflow when a pull request is created, you can use on: pull_request.

You want to ensure that a pull request may only be merged when all quality checks have passed.

To integrate the code checks with any pull requests that target the main branch, you'll need to do:

  1. Navigate to the Settings tab in your repo.
  2. Select Branches.
  3. Enable require status checks to pass before merging within the branch protection rule for the main branch.

Screenshot of setting to require status checks before merging.

Here, you can search and select your linters and unit tests to set them as required. Whenever you then create a pull request, you'll notice that it will trigger your GitHub Actions and only when the workflows pass successfully will you be able to merge the pull request.

Note

To configure the code checks to be required before merging a pull request, your job needs to have a name in the GitHub Actions workflow. You can then find the checks by searching for the job names.