CI/CD Optimization: Launching lightweight "Formality Check" webhook pilot in packages repo

Josef Schlehofer pepe.schlehofer at gmail.com
Mon Jun 29 07:50:18 PDT 2026


Dear OpenWrt community and developers,

As some of you have noticed, GitHub Actions runners can recently take a long time to pick up jobs. GitHub was generous enough to increase our concurrency limits as a courtesy, for which we are very grateful, but we still need to optimize CI/CD usage across our repositories (main, packages, luci, etc.).

My goal is to improve the contributor experience. Previously, contributors had to wait tens of minutes or even hours for a full GitHub Actions run just to get feedback on minor formatting issues that take seconds to fix.

To address this, I have developed a lightweight custom webhook. It is designed to instantly handle tasks like the formality check, labeler check, and other basic repository rules (such as notifying users whose PRs originate from the master or main branches). By offloading these checks to a webhook, we can significantly reduce the number of GitHub Actions runs.

After a discussion with Ansuel, we agreed to pilot this tool in the packages repository. Starting today, you will see the "openwrt [bot]" providing near-instant feedback on PR layout and guidelines. We will make the repository public later.
I have done my best to thoroughly test the webhook in my own environment, but scaling it up to the community repository might reveal some edge cases. If you encounter any bugs, I kindly ask for your patience and cooperation while we fine-tune it. Testing against a larger dataset is the best way to catch remaining issues.

I took to heart the feedback regarding recent CI/CD changes (such as the package version check during Docker test runs) where lack of prior communication was criticized. I hope this note keeps everyone well-informed moving forward.

Thank you for your support,
Josef


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