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GitHub Actions

Run data contract tests in the same workflow twice over: on every change (push and pull request), so a breaking change is caught in the PR that introduces it, and on a cron schedule, so data drift in production is caught between changes.

The quickest route is the ready-made datacontract/datacontract-action. To run the CLI directly:

# .github/workflows/datacontract.yml
name: Data Contract CI

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
  pull_request:
  schedule:
    # Run every day at 06:00 UTC to catch data drift in production
    - cron: "0 6 * * *"

jobs:
  datacontract-ci:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-python@v5
        with:
          python-version: "3.11"
      - run: pip install datacontract-cli
      # Test one or more data contracts (supports globs, e.g. contracts/*.yaml)
      - run: datacontract ci datacontract.yaml
        env:
          DATACONTRACT_POSTGRES_USERNAME: ${{ secrets.DB_USERNAME }}
          DATACONTRACT_POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ${{ secrets.DB_PASSWORD }}

What ci does in Actions​

The ci command detects GitHub Actions and emits:

  • Annotations on failed checks, so violations show up inline in the PR.
  • A job summary with the check results as markdown.
  • A nonzero exit code on violations, failing the workflow; tune with --fail-on error|warning|never (see controlling failure behavior).

Credentials​

Pass credentials for the server under test as configuration environment variables from GitHub secrets, as in the example above (DATACONTRACT_POSTGRES_USERNAME, DATACONTRACT_SNOWFLAKE_PASSWORD, …). Each data source's variables are listed in Test your Data.

Publishing results​

Add --publish to track results centrally:

      - run: datacontract ci datacontract.yaml --publish https://api.entropy-data.com/api/test-results
        env:
          ENTROPY_DATA_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.ENTROPY_DATA_API_KEY }}

See Integrate with Entropy Data.