8/27/2024

Integrating Ollama with GitHub for Automated Pull Request Reviews

GitHub has been a game-changer in development workflows, enabling seamless collaboration for developers around the globe. However, as teams grow, the complexity of managing pull requests (PRs) also increases. That's where Ollama comes in, providing an efficient way to automate PR reviews using powerful Large Language Models (LLMs). In this blog post, we’ll explore how to integrate Ollama with GitHub to streamline your code review process.

What is Ollama?

Ollama is an innovative platform that allows developers to utilize language models such as Llama seamlessly on their local machines. It provides a lightweight, extensible framework for running various language models, making it a great tool for automating numerous tasks such as chat responses, content generation, and importantly for us, code reviews.

Why Integrate Ollama with GitHub?

As software development grows more complex, timely and effective code reviews can be challenging. Automating the review process can help reduce errors, identify quality issues early, & enhance collaboration between team members. Here's why you should consider integrating Ollama with GitHub for your automated PR reviews:

Speed: Ollama can analyze PR code and provide insights faster than any human reviewer.
Consistency: Automated reviews help ensure your coding standards are consistently followed across all PRs.
Reduced Workload: By automating repetitive manual checks, developers can focus on more complex issues that need human intervention.
Custom Feedback: Customize your automated review process to focus on the areas that matter most to your team.

Prerequisites for Integration

Before we begin setting up this integration, make sure you have the following:

A GitHub account.
An Ollama installation on your local machine. You can easily install Ollama using the quick command:
1 2bash curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh
Familiarity with GitHub Actions as we will be using it to automate PR reviews.

Step 1: Setting Up GitHub Actions for Ollama

GitHub Actions provides you with a way to set up automated workflows that can respond to events in your repository, such as PR creations. Here’s how to create a workflow that integrates Ollama for automated PR review:

Create a new file in your GitHub repository under
1.github/workflows
called
1ollama_review.yml
.
Define the triggers for this workflow. For PR reviews, you will want it to trigger on
1pull_request
events:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8yaml name: Ollama PR Review on: pull_request: types: [opened, synchronize] jobs: review: runs-on: ubuntu-latest
Next, define the steps in your workflow. Here’s an example of how you might implement the Ollama integration:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7yaml steps: - name: Checkout code uses: actions/checkout@v2 - name: Run Ollama Review run: | ollama run llama3.1 "Evaluate this code: $(cat path_to_your_file)"

This basic setup checks out code & runs the specified language model on the file you want to analyze. Make sure to replace

path_to_your_file

with the path to the file you want to review.

Step 2: Analyzing Changes

When you create a pull request, GitHub will provide a diff of the changes made. Our objective is to send these changes to Ollama for review. You can modify the previous step in your workflow file:

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- name: Analyze Changes
  run: |
    diff=$(git diff HEAD^ HEAD)
    ollama run llama3.1 "Please review the following changes: $diff"

This step captures the changes between the last commit and the current state of the branch & sends them to Ollama for analysis.

Step 3: Forwarding Review Comments to GitHub

Once Ollama evaluates the changes and returns feedback, you want that feedback recorded directly on GitHub for each pull request. You can achieve this using the GitHub API. Here’s how you can update our workflow:

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- name: Post Comments on PR
  env:
    GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
  run: |
    response=$(ollama run llama3.1 "Here’s my review of the changes:")
    curl -X POST -H "Authorization: token $GITHUB_TOKEN" \
    -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json" \
    https://api.github.com/repos/<USERNAME>/<REPO>/issues/$(echo $GITHUB_REF | cut -d '/' -f 3)/comments \
    -d "{\"body\": \"$response\"}"

Make sure to replace

<USERNAME>

and

<REPO>

with your GitHub username and repository name, respectively.

Step 4: Allow Additional Customizations

With Ollama integrated with GitHub Actions, you can now customize what models to run, which guidelines to enforce, timing of reviews, etc. Here are some suggestions for customizations you can implement:

Model Customization: Customize the language model used by Ollama to fit the specific requirements of your code base.
Feedback Categories: Expand your PR reviews to check specific criteria such as code cleanliness, complex logic, or adherence to naming conventions by creating focused scripts.
Multiple Languages: If your repository contains multiple languages, integrate different models based on file types by creating conditional steps in your workflow.

Conclusion

Integrating Ollama with GitHub can dramatically enhance your team’s workflow by automating PR reviews. With just a few lines of setup, you can leverage the power of language models to gain insightful, context-aware feedback at lightning speed. As the tool evolves, consider exploring more complex integrations or community-driven extensions.

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Incorporating these tools helps set a firm foundation for a productive and efficient development pipeline. Happy coding!