Configuration

FlexReview allows you to onboard teams gradually. You can try FlexReview from one team, and expand it to others. You can configure FlexReview at the repository level and at the team level.

Repository configs

Enable / Disable

You can toggle FlexReview at the repository level. By enabling it at the repository level, it starts indexing Pull Requests for the reviewer suggestions.

Author Allowlist

When FlexReview is enabled at the repository and owner teams enable FlexReview, it will start assigning a reviewer. You can further restrict this behavior based on the author. If this is configured, FlexReview will assign a reviewer if the PR author is in this group. This is by default '*', which indicates there's no restriction on the PR author.

Reviewer Exclusion

There are cases where you don't want to assign certain users. For example, managers can be in a team, but you might not want to assign them as a reviewer. You can add users and groups you do not want to assign as a reviewer.

GitHub Team configs

Enable / Disable

You can toggle FlexReview at the GitHub team level. By enabling FlexReview at the team level and at the repository level, it will start assigning a reviewer based on the review assignment methods for PRs that modify the files that this team owns.

Enable / Disable

To enable FlexReview for a specific repository, select that repository from the dropdown and click the Enable button on the top right. This will start indexing the past pull request data but keep the repository in read-only mode. To disable it for a specific repository, click the Disable button from the FlexReview config page.

The same can also be done from the Repositories list page.

Sub-repo configurations

Sub-repo configuration allows you to activate FlexReview for some parts of your repository while keeping it in read-only mode in other parts. Both of the sub-repo configuration file path uses the gitignore file pattern format.

Reviewer Suggestion

Specifies which file paths Aviator should suggest reviewers for. Multiple file paths are supported, one on each line. The file paths can be specified in the gitignore file pattern format.

Aviator will publish a suggestion comment for every pull request that touches a file in these whitelisted file paths. The suggestion provided by Aviator will always cover all files in the PR, even if the PR only has some files that are covered under the whitelisted file path. Read more in how to get a reviewer suggestion.

Reviewer Exclusion

In a large organization, it may be desired to exclude certain reviewers from being suggested. These could be SREs, managers, product managers, designers or other inactive collaborators who may have access to the code base, and have contributed in the past but are passive collaborators now.

The excluded reviewers are still accepted for approval check validation, but are never suggested by FlexReview.

To exclude the reviewers, enter their GitHub handles on the FlexReview config page. Enter one username per line.

CODEOWNERS

This configuration lets you specify a custom path for the CODEOWNERS file. One of the core advantages of using FlexReview is that it reduces the total number of reviewers required for each PR when compared to the default CODEOWNERS assignment. Using a non-default path ensures that GitHub will not auto-assign reviewers for a pull request, and lets FlexReview assign reviewers instead.

This configuration is completely optional. If your team does not use a CODEOWNERS file, or if you want to keep the default path for CODEOWNERS, you can keep this blank.

Assignment conflict

When auto-assignment is enabled but GitHub is also assigning reviewers based on the CODEOWNERS file, Aviator will replace the default reviewers with the suggested ones. Note that depending on your team's configuration, this may still notify the default reviewers before they are removed from the reviewers list.