CLA Assistant Lite GitHub Action

Hello Community,

We are in development of CLA Assistant Lite Github action (a light version of CLA Assistant). With this Action, we can get rid of the need of a centrally managed database and rather storing all the contributors data in something like a cla.md file. I understand, this action won’t be able to provide all the feature-sets of the current CLA Assistant OAuth App , However, this will work just fine If you want to configure CLA Assistant for a repo and store all the contributors data inside the repo file system itself.

Advantages

1. decentralizing the database of contributors
2. fully integrated with github environment
3. no UI is required
4. no need to grant any permission/scope

So, The CLA Lite Action will be triggered whenever there is a pull_request event and will check If the Contributors have signed the CLA.

Signing CLA inside GitHub Environment

Now the question arises on how the contributors will sign the CLA inside the GitHub environment. What we thought is to ask the contributors to react with 👍 on the CLA Pull request comment for signing the CLA something like the below screenshot.

Please kindly let us know your thoughts and comments on CLA Lite GitHub Action or If you have any better solution for signing the CLA inside the GitHub environment .

cc: @thojansen @KharitonOff

[thojansen]

@daveaglick Agree that a comment would be more specific. This could even enable custom fields, but would require a clear syntax, e.g. put a comment which ends with something like the following.

Hereby, I sign v1 of the CLA with Name: Thomas Jansen, E-Mail: [e-mail]

[daveaglick]

Love this idea!

What we thought is to ask the contributors to react with 👍 on the CLA Pull request comment

While that seems like a great user experience and I’d prefer it without any other considerations, I’m a little worried about how easy it is and whether it adequately expresses an intent to “sign” the CLA.

What about requiring a comment with specific wording like “I, Dave Glick, agree to the terms of this CLA”. You could provide a template in the comment from the bot:

Thank you for your submission, we really appreciate it. Like many open source projects, we ask that you sign our Contributor License Agreement before we can accept your contribution.

Please add a comment to this issue with the below text to acknowledge and sign the CLA:

I, [Your Name], agree to the terms of the provided CLA

I also noticed the bot comment in the screen shot above doesn’t actually link to the CLA - I’m assuming that was just omitted while testing out the language?