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Using OPA in CI/CD Pipelines

OPA is an great tool for implementing policy-as-code guardrails in CI/CD pipelines. With OPA, you can automatically verify configurations, validate outputs, and enforce organizational policies before code reaches production. OPA serves as a powerful 'swiss army knife' for implementing custom checks required by your organization that might be difficult to implement in a script or in another tool.

For users looking to parse and validate configuration files or Infrastructure as Code (IaC) committed to git, Conftest is typically the better choice as it supports many file formats (HCL, Jsonnet etc.). However, OPA's eval command excels at connecting other tools and making checks against runtime data, as it can only parse JSON and YAML formats.

OPA as a CLI tool provides powerful capabilities for testing and validating various types of data in your continuous integration workflows:

  • Repository governance - Use OPA to call GitHub APIs to validate commit message formats and pull request metadata compliance.
  • Software supply chain validation - Check package manager configurations (package.json, requirements.txt, go.mod) to ensure dependencies meet security and licensing requirements.
  • Test selection - Determine which tests to run based on the files that changed, optimizing CI runtime by only executing relevant test suites based on changed files.
  • Checking JSON test coverage reports - Ensure test coverage meets minimum thresholds or that benchmarks results are within acceptable limits.
  • Defining dependencies between jobs - Validate that deployment pipelines follow proper sequencing and dependency requirements. An example of this can be found in the OPA Repo's own PR checks.
  • Test coverage enforcement - Check that test files are added when code files are created (e.g., ensuring each foo.js has a corresponding foo_test.js in the appropriate directory).

The opa eval command provides several flags that are particularly useful for CI/CD scenarios:

  • --fail and --fail-defined - Set the exit code to 1 based on query results (--fail when undefined or false, --fail-defined when defined), making it easy to fail CI jobs when policies are violated
  • --stdin-input - Reads input data from stdin, allowing you to pipe output from other commands directly into OPA for evaluation
  • -d - load in JSON or YAML data files for evaluation.

These flags help ensure your CI/CD pipelines respond appropriately to policy evaluation results and integrate smoothly with other tools in your pipeline.

GitHub Actions Integration​

For GitHub users, the easiest way to get started is using the official OPA setup action. This will make the opa command available in your workflow, allowing you to run OPA policies against your codebase.

OPA installation step
- name: Download OPA
  uses: open-policy-agent/setup-opa
  with:
    version: latest # install the latest version
Example workflow checking test coverage
name: OPA Checks
on: [pull_request]

jobs:
  validate-configs:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v4

    - name: Download OPA
      uses: open-policy-agent/setup-opa
      with:
        version: edge

    - name: Check tests results coverage remains above 70%
      run: |
        my test command |
          opa eval --fail-defined \
          --stdin-input \
          'input.results[_].coverage < 0.7'

Other CI/CD Platforms​

For users of other CI/CD platforms (GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, etc.), you can download OPA directly from the official installation page. This provides installation instructions for various operating systems and package managers.