Contributor License Agreement (CLA) assistant

Streamline your workflow and let CLA assistant handle the legal side of contributions to a repository for you. CLA assistant enables contributors to sign CLAs from within a pull request.

To get started, simply store your CLA as a GitHub Gist file then link it with the repository/organization in CLA assistant. Then sit back and relax while CLA assistant:

• Comments on each opened pull request to ask the contributor to sign the CLA
• Allows contributors to sign a CLA from within a pull request
• Authenticates the signee with their GitHub account
• Updates the status of a pull request when the contributor agrees to the CLA
• Automatically asks users to re-sign the CLA for each new pull request in the event the associated Gist & CLA has changed

Repository owners can review a list of users who signed the CLA for each version of it. To get started, visit cla-assistant.io.

We also developed a lite version of CLA Assistant using GitHub Actions which is in Alpha. You can checkout it out here.

Try

CLA assistant is provided by SAP as a free hosted offering under cla-assistant.io. Please open a GitHub issue if you have feedback.

Request more information from the CLA signer

If you need to collect detailed information about your contributors you can add so called "custom fields" to your CLA. This can be done by providing CLA assistant with some metadata that describes the data you are going to collect. CLA assistant will generate a form based on this metadata and contributors will be requested to fill out the form before they sign your CLA.

Following steps need to be done:

• Go to the Gist with your CLA and add a new file with name "metadata" (like this)
• describe custom fields in JSON format (according to the JSON Schema)

{
    "name": {
        "title": "Full Name",
        "type": "string",
        "githubKey": "name"
    },
    "email": {
        "title": "E-Mail",
        "type": "string",
        "githubKey": "email",
        "required": true
    },
    "age": {
        "title": "Age",
        "description": "Age in years",
        "type": "number",
        "minimum": 18,
        "maximum": 99
    },
    "jobtitle": {
        "title": "Job Title:",
        "type": {
            "select": [
                "President",
                "Vice President",
                "Director",
                "Senior Manager",
                "Manager",
                "Architect",
                "Software Engineer",
                "Other"
            ]
        },
        "required": true
    }
    "agreement": {
        "title": "I have read and agree to the CLA",
        "type": "boolean",
        "required": true
    },
    "category": {
        "title": "How do you sign?",
        "type": {
            "enum": [
                "I am signing on behalf of myself.",
                "I am signing on behalf of my employer."
            ]
        },
        "required": true
    }
}

You can also define which of required information can be taken from user's GitHub account. In that case CLA assistant prefills the form with GitHub data. The possible values for the "githubKey"-property can be found in the GitHub-API description.

FAQ

Where is the list of signees stored?

Since 27.08.2021 all data is stored in a Cosmos DB (MongoDB compatible) hosted on Microsoft Azure in Europe (#740). Before that all the data was stored in a MongoDB hosted by mLab.

Where can I see the list of signees? Is there a way to import/export the signee data?

You can see the list of signees on the user interface. There is also a possibility for you to export the list as a .csv file.

What should my Contributor License Agreement say?

We're no lawyers, but we can suggest using https://contributoragreements.org/ for a fill-in-the-blank approach to creating a CLA tailored to your needs.

Who can I contact for help?

In case of problems or any further questions, please check our general trouble shooting issue or open an issue. We always appreciate helpful tips and support for the project.

How can I contribute?

You want to contribute to CLA Assistant? Welcome! Please read here.

Can I allow bot user contributions?

Since there's no way for bot users (such as Dependabot or Greenkeeper) to sign a CLA, you may want to allow their contributions without it. You can do so by importing their names (in this case dependabot[bot] and greenkeeper[bot]) in the CLA assistant dashboard.

Setup your own instance of CLA assistant

Clone this repository, change into the cloned directory and install dependencies.

git clone https://github.com/cla-assistant/cla-assistant
cd ./cla-assistant
npm install

Please check the package.json for the supported and tested versions of node and npm.

Register an OAuth application on GitHub. The callback URL needs to be of the form of <PROTOCOL>://<HOST>:<PORT>/auth/github/callback.

Note: You can use ngrok to get a publicly accessible URL which redirects to your localhost:5000 by executing the following command:

ngrok http 5000

If you use ngrok, you need to update the HOST variable in your .env file and set PROTOCOL to "https".

Copy the sample configuration file .env.example file to .env.

cp .env.example .env

You require a MongoDB or compatible database as a backend such as:

• Azure Cosmos DB
• FerretDB and their blog post about using it with CLA Assistant

Note: For development purposes you can run MongoDB in a docker container easily:

docker run --detach --publish 27017:27017 mongo

With that you need to adjust the MONGODB environment variable in the .env file to mongodb://localhost:27017/cla_assistant.

Setup GitHub App

• Register an GitHub App and add repository permissions for Pull Requests.
• Copy the App Name, App ID, Client ID and Client Secret into the .env.
• Generate a new private key, download it and add the contents to the .env file (GITHUB_APP_PRIVATE_KEY)

Note: If your private key isn't recognized properly, you can try to fill the contents from a file:

export GITHUB_APP_PRIVATE_KEY="$(cat key.pem)"

Supported environment variables

The following are the environment variables you have to configure to run a private instance:

Name	Description
GITHUB_CLIENT	The client ID for authenticating with the GitHub API.
GITHUB_SECRET	The secret key for authenticating with the GitHub API.
GITHUB_TOKEN	The access token for making authenticated requests to the GitHub API.
GITHUB_APP_NAME	The name of the registered GitHub App.
GITHUB_APP_PRIVATE_KEY	The contents of the private key for the registered GitHub App.
GITHUB_APP_ID	The ID of the registered GitHub App.
GITHUB_APP_CLIENT	The client ID of the registered GitHub App.
GITHUB_APP_SECRET	The client secret of the registered GitHub App.
MONGODB	The URI for the MongoDB database (e. g. mongodb://<user>:<password>@<host>:<port>/<dbname>).

These are optional environment variables:

Name	Description	Default
GITHUB_PROTOCOL	The protocol to use for GitHub API requests.	https
GITHUB_HOST	The hostname of the GitHub server.	github.com
GITHUB_API_HOST	The API hostname of the GitHub server.	api.github.com
GITHUB_VERSION	The version of the GitHub API to use.	3.0.0
GITHUB_GRAPHQL	The URL for accessing the GitHub GraphQL API.	https://api.github.com/graphql
GITHUB_ADMIN_USERS	(comma-separated) If set, will only allow the specified GitHub users to administer this instance of the app.
GITHUB_DELAY	The delay in milliseconds to enforce on webhooks.	5000
TIME_TO_WAIT	The time to wait between API calls to avoid rate limits (in milliseconds).	1000
PORT	The local port to bind to.	5000
PROTOCOL	The protocol to use for the CLA assistant (http or https).	http
HOST	The hostname of the CLA assistant (without the protocol).	cla-assistant.io
HOST_PORT	The port for the CLA assistant if it doesn't use standard HTTP ports.
SESSION_SECRET	The secret key for session encryption.	cla-assistant
SMTP_HOST	The hostname of the SMTP server.
SMTP_SSL	Whether to use SSL/TLS for SMTP connections.	false
SMTP_PORT	The port number for the SMTP server.	465
SMTP_USER	The username for SMTP authentication.
SMTP_PASS	The password for SMTP authentication.
SLACK_URL	The URL for sending log notifications to Slack.
SLACK_CHANNEL	The name of the Slack channel to send log notifications to.
LOGIN_PAGE_TEMPLATE	The path to the login page HTML template.
REQUIRED_SIGNEES
ORG_OVERRIDE_ENABLED
REQUEST_TRACE_HEADER_NAME	Use the value of an HTTP-header to set the name. E.g. the request id set by an ingress controller via X-Req-Id. If not set or no HTTP-header is present a random uuid is used.
LOG_TRACE_FIELD_NAME	The log field name where the request trace ID is stored.	req_id
LOG_TRACE_PREFIX	A prefix added to the request trace ID.

Hint: For further reading on setting up MongoDB, check the "Getting Started" and db.createUser() method.

Run grunt in order to build the application.

npx grund build

During development, just run the grunt default task to build the app, start linter checks and run unit tests on each change of relevant .js files.

npx grunt

Finally, source the environment file and start the application.

source .env
npm run start

Quick start with Docker Compose

To get a CLA assistant instance quickly up you can as well use Docker compose:

git clone https://github.com/cla-assistant/cla-assistant
cd ./cla-assistant

cp .env.example .env
# Update GITHUB_CLIENT, GITHUB_SECRET and GITHUB_TOKEN with your values in .env
docker-compose up

Now you can navigate to http://localhost:5000 and access your installation. To locally test webhooks you needs to expose it via e.g. ngrok as outlined above.

Run the CLA assistant instance with Docker

To run the CLA assistant instance with docker:

docker build -t cla-assistant .
docker run -d -p 5000:5000 \
    -e HOST=.. \
    -e PORT=... \
    cla-assistant

For the list of supported environments see supported environment variables.

License

Contributor License Agreement assistant

Copyright (c) 2022 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Credits