🚀 Community CI is now public and contributor-triggered

[yifeif-nv]

🚀 Community CI is now public and contributor-triggered

We have updated our contribution workflow to make CI feedback faster, more transparent, and easier for community contributors to act on.

Contributors can now run lightweight checks locally and trigger Community CI directly from their pull request—without waiting for a maintainer to identify a formatting, lint, build, or CPU test failure.

Simply comment:

/run-ci

The workflow runs on a public GitHub-hosted CPU runner, and the complete logs are visible to the contributor.

Why we made this change

A productive open-source workflow should make it easy for contributors to understand what failed, reproduce the issue locally, and submit a fix.

Previously, contributors could require maintainer assistance just to discover a relatively simple CI failure. The updated workflow gives contributors direct access to the feedback they need while reserving maintainer involvement for validation that requires internal infrastructure or GPU resources.

The result is:

• Faster feedback for contributors
• Fewer unnecessary maintainer handoffs
• Public, actionable CI logs
• Easier local reproduction and debugging
• Faster iteration for the entire community

Two layers of contributor validation

1. Local pre-commit checks

Install the repository’s lightweight pre-commit hooks to catch formatting and basic lint issues before committing:

python3 -m pip install --requirement requirements/community-ci.txt
pre-commit install --install-hooks

These hooks support Linux, macOS, and Windows.

There is intentionally no pre-push hook. Heavier validation belongs in CI rather than blocking every local push.

2. Public Community CI

After pushing your changes to a pull request, comment:

/run-ci

This triggers the source-only Community CPU suite, which includes:

• Source-quality and formatting checks
• Ownership and test-impact validation
• Source-only C++ and Python unit tests
• An aggregated required check

The workflow validates the pull request’s exact merge commit.

A single status comment is updated throughout the run:

RUNNING → PASSED

or:

RUNNING → FAILED

When validation fails, the status comment links directly to the public GitHub Actions logs. Contributors can inspect the complete error output, reproduce the failure locally, push a fix, and run Community CI again—without access to NVIDIA’s private CI systems.

The new contribution flow

Once Community CI passes, contributors can ask a maintainer to trigger the internal CI required for final approval, including validation that depends on GPU resources or internal infrastructure.

The contribution guides have also been updated with setup instructions, workflow details, and troubleshooting guidance.

Thank you to everyone contributing issues, fixes, tests, documentation, and new model support. We hope this workflow makes contributing simpler and helps the entire community move faster. 🙌