Reviewing Changes with ZapCircle

Whether or not you use ZapCircle to manage your code with behaviors, you can use the zapcircle review command to help with code reviews.

The review command takes any files that have been modified since the last git commit to the main branch, and then sends them over one at a time to your configured LLM for a line-by-line code analysis.

npx zapcircle review

You’ll also get a summary review from the LLM that will tell you broader-level things you can improve with your code.

Using ZapCircle with GitHub Actions for Pull Requests

The most likely case to use this is with pull requests - ZapCircle can run as a GitHub Action when you open a pull request on GitHub.

ZapCircle will not block any merges, no matter how egregious the code review is - it simply offers suggestions.

Passing the --github flag to the review command sends the output to GitHub, rather than writing it to the console.

npx zapcircle review --github

In most cases, you’ll want to set this up as a GitHub Action inside your repository.

Sample GitHub Actions YML file

The GitHub Action definition below would go into the .github/workflows directory of your repository, with a name like zapcircle-review.yml.

You will need to configure an OPENAI_API_KEY repository secret as well. This can be found on GitHub’s Settings page for your repository, under the Secrets and variables menu and then within the Actions menu item.

name: ZapCircle Review

on:
  pull_request:
    types: [opened, synchronize, reopened]

permissions:
  pull-requests: write  # REQUIRED for posting comments

jobs:
  zapcircle_review:
    name: ZapCircle PR Review
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0

      - name: Set up Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: 20

      - name: Install ZapCircle CLI
        run: npm install -g zapcircle

      - name: Run ZapCircle Review
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          OPENAI_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.OPENAI_API_KEY }}
        run: |
          npx zapcircle review --github

The results will appear in your GitHub pull request. Any updates to the branch after the pull request is opened will trigger another run of the review process, and the summary and issues will be replaced by the latest results.