Command to validate policy.yml

[reegnz]

Today one can only validate .policy.yml by running a policy-bot service, and allowing whoever needs to validate to invoke the /api/validate HTTP endpoint. But the network path isn't necessarily available from every host that wants to validate the config.

Policy-bot should provide a basic cli command to validate a .policy.yml. Eg.: policy-bot validate .policy.yml. This way validation can be done fully offline (eg. no network path necessary to a policy-bot service instance).

Alternatives considered

I've considered running policy-bot locally in a github action as a service container. But I cannot just launch the container because on startup it requires a valid github app configuration, Which is overkill and hurts reuse if I want to just use it for config validation.

I also considered declaring a schema for the .policy.yml and use json schema validation. But that doesn't validate the regexes for validity.

A simple cli command to validate config would be easier on the end-users.

Context

I'm building a github action to validate .policy.yml. I don't want my action to have to call out to a policy-bot service to perform validation, as it makes the action more complex. I don't want my github action runners to have a clear network path to the policy-bot service if it's not absolutely necessary.