Company
Date Published
Author
Jeff Klukas
Word count
1994
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The text discusses the challenges and solutions associated with managing continuous integration (CI) workflows for forked pull requests, particularly when dealing with sensitive data and credentials. It highlights the potential security risks of running untrusted code from external contributors in CI environments and introduces a method to mitigate these risks by using GitHub and CircleCI. The approach involves having trusted team members review forked pull requests to ensure they do not expose secrets before triggering CI jobs that require credentials. The process includes marking code as trusted by pushing it to an upstream branch, which allows the CI system to run secure jobs only for code considered safe. The text provides a practical example using a Java project and CircleCI configurations, illustrating how to set up workflows with different levels of access to credentials. It also suggests using branch protection rules and status checks on GitHub to ensure that all necessary tests pass before merging a pull request, thereby maintaining the integrity and security of the codebase. Additionally, it mentions new developments in CI tools, like CircleCI's restricted contexts, which offer more flexible ways to manage credential exposure during the CI process.