get-started.md

description
Automate your code quality enforcement with just a few clicks.

GitHub Integration

Trunk Code Quality has the ability to post its results to the Trunk Code Quality web app. This will enable you to view your repository's Code Quality history over time so you can track the trend of issues in your code, as well as browse the issues in your repository to help you understand which issues should be prioritized to fix.

Connect your Trunk organization to GitHub

Sign up at app.trunk.io, create a Trunk organization, and connect it to your repositories. You will need to grant the following GitHub App permissions.

{% @supademo/embed demoId="HXyBmoBn0_OX9Xite2fqd" url="https://app.supademo.com/demo/HXyBmoBn0_OX9Xite2fqd" %}

Set Up Trunk Code Quality

Once your Trunk organization is connected to GitHub, create a .trunk repo in your account or organization and grant Trunk permissions to access the repo. The .trunk repo will hold the workflows to scan your codebase and pull requests. Learn more about the .trunk repo.

{% @supademo/embed demoId="pRr_eDzh-klIQdK_yW3se" url="https://app.supademo.com/demo/pRr_eDzh-klIQdK_yW3se" %}

Configure Slack Notifications (optional)

If you would like to receive notifications for new issues Trunk finds in your repo, you can configure Trunk to be connected to Slack.

{% @supademo/embed demoId="cllpdjqhy1jf1051a1nff1a3y" url="https://app.supademo.com/demo/cllpdjqhy1jf1051a1nff1a3y" %}

Use it!

Ensure that PRs are free of issues

Check out this example in our plugins repository!

Trunk Code Quality identifying a security issue in one of Trunk's own repositories

Scanning your repository

Trunk Code Quality can scan your repository for Code Quality issues on a daily cadence, upload them to Trunk for you to review at your convenience, and notify you via Slack whenever new issues are discovered in your repository.

This allows you to build confidence in the code health of your repositories:

• You will be alerted quickly in a Heartbleed-type event, giving you assurances about whether or not a newly discovered vulnerability affects any of your repositories, and
• You can monitor how many Code Quality issues exist in each of your repositories and make data-driven decisions about prioritizing efforts to reduce tech debt

If you don't want Trunk Code Quality to scan your repository on a daily cadence or notify you, you can turn it off in your repository's settings.

Trunk Code Quality showing all the issues present in trunk-demo1/sass

Get Slack notifications about new issues in your repository

Not only do our daily scans allow you to browse and triage the issues in your repository, but they can also notify you when new security issues are discovered in packages you already depend on.

Slack notification showing newly discovered issues with rustls-webpki in trunk-io/trunk

Checking pull requests

Trunk Code Quality can automatically detect new Code Quality issues on your pull requests and flag them so that you can prevent pull requests from introducing any new issues in your repository.

When running on a pull request, Trunk Code Quality will only flag new issues, not existing ones, so that your engineers don't have to fix pre-existing linter issues in every file they touch - this is the same hold-the-line technology that our VSCode extension and CLI use.

Fixing issues in pull requests

To confirm that you've fixed issues identified by Trunk Code Quality before pushing your pull request, just run trunk check.

If Trunk continues to identify new Code Quality issues on your PR, first try merging the latest changes from your base branch. When Trunk runs on a PR, it runs on a commit that merges your PR into its base branch, just like GitHub workflows.

If this continues to fail, then run git checkout refs/pull/<PR number>/merge && trunk check. This is a reference to the merge commit GitHub creates.

Skipping Trunk Code Quality

You can include /trunk skip-check in the body of a PR description (i.e. the first comment on a given PR) to mark Trunk Code Quality as "skipped". Trunk Code Quality will still run on your PR and report issues, but this will allow the PR to pass a GitHub required status check on Trunk Check.

This can be helpful if Code Quality is flagging known issues in a given PR that you don't want to ignore, which can come in handy if you're doing a large refactor.

If you don't want Trunk Code Quality to run on pull requests, turn it off in your repository's settings.

Uploading Results

The upload feature of Trunk Code Quality will upload all of the issues found by Trunk to the Trunk services. In order to get an accurate picture of the state of your repository, you'll want to upload all of the Trunk Code Quality issues for your whole repository.

Generally this should be done within your Continuous Integration system (CI) automatically whenever pull requests are filed or pushed to a specific branch in your repo. Trunk Code Quality can also run periodically to check for new vulnerabilities in your dependencies.

How Does It Work?

Under the hood, the GitHub integration does the following to your organization to enable Trunk Code Quality in GitHub Actions Workflows:

• An installation of the Trunk.io GitHub app in your GitHub organization
• A .trunk repository in your GitHub organization.

What is a .trunk repository?

The .trunk repository contains the workflows run to scan your codebase and pull requests. We recommend creating a .trunk repository in your GitHub organization using this template repository.

Your .trunk repository must be added to your Trunk GitHub app installation. You can verify this by navigating to: https://github.com/organizations/<your_organization>/settings/installations, clicking "configure" next to Trunk-io, and verifying that the repository access is either "All repositories" or that your .trunk repository is selected.

To find Code Quality issues in your repositories and pull requests, we dispatch GitHub Actions workflows in your .trunk repository, which check out your repositories and pull requests and then run trunk check in them. This strategy allows you to:

• start using Trunk Code Quality in all your repositories without any configuration, and
• be in full control over the environment where we analyze your code, since we're running on your GitHub Actions runners.

{% hint style="info" %} 🚧 .trunk should have private visibility

Since we use workflow runs in .trunk to analyze any repository in your organization and record Code Quality findings, you should think carefully about who has permissions to view workflow runs in your .trunk repository. For most organizations, simply making your .trunk repository private will be sufficient. {% endhint %}

(optional) Custom setup logic

If you need to do some setup before trunk check runs in your-org/your-repo, you can define a GitHub composite action in .trunk/setup-ci/action.yaml in your-repo. This can be important if, for example, a linter needs some generated code to be present before it can run:

name: Trunk Code Quality setup
description: Set up dependencies for Trunk Code Quality

runs:
  using: composite
  steps:
    - name: Build required trunk check inputs
      shell: bash
      run: bazel build ... --build_tag_filters=pre-lint
      
    - name: Install eslint dependencies
      shell: bash
      run: npm install

Read more in the documentation for our GitHub Action.