qa

Federated QA runner for monorepos on unix based systems.

Runs format commands and checks defined in .qa.yml files. Checks are cached using git tree hashes—unchanged code is skipped automatically.

In a mono-repo the number of QA checks you have can grow to be unwieldy. You need to format/lint/unit test the front end, backend, maybe terraform, possibly you have other checks as well. Ideally you should be doing this everytime you commit.

Install

Installs on unix based systems to /usr/local/bin/qa

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openark-net/qa/main/install.sh | bash

Usage

qa                  # run checks from .qa.yml
qa --no-cache       # run all checks, skip cache
qa init hook        # install pre-commit hook

Configuration

Create a .qa.yml in your project root:

format:
  - go fmt ./...

checks:
  - go vet ./...
  - go test ./...

Monorepo Setup

Use includes to compose checks across subdirectories:

includes:
  - api/.qa.yml
  - web/.qa.yml
  - mobile/.qa.yml

format:
  - ./scripts/lint-all

Each subdirectory has its own .qa.yml:

# web/.qa.yml
format:
  - npx prettier --write .

checks:
  - npm run build
  - npm test

Fields

Field	Description
format	Commands run sequentially before checks
checks	Commands run in parallel with caching
includes	Paths to other .qa.yml files

Caching

Checks are cached per directory using git index tree hashes. A check is skipped when:

1. The directory has no unstaged changes
2. The index tree hash matches the last successful run

This works seamlessly with pre-commit hooks—staged changes are cached correctly before the commit is created.

$ qa
✓ api: go test ./...       (3.4s)
✓ web: npm test            (5.1s)

# edit api/handler.go, run again
$ qa
✓ api: go test ./...       (2.8s)
○ web: npm test            (cached)

Cache is stored in ~/.cache/qa. Use --no-cache to bypass.

Why?!

Personally I work in a lot of mono repos. I used to have something similar to this as a bashscript that would run things in parallel but didn't have caching. Running my unit tests in platformio repos can take over 10 seconds, and this would happen every time I made a commit in a non-platformio part of the repo.

So I spent an hour or two building this....

How many years of commits will I need to make in order to start saving time?! Who knows?

Windows

Sorry I don't have a way to test this on Windows.