Learn how to automate prompt validation with GitHub Actions to protect your main branch.
As your prompt library becomes a critical part of your application, you need to treat it with the same rigor as your source code. Manually checking every prompt before deployment is tedious and error-prone.
This guide will show you how to build an automated quality gate for your prompts using GitHub Actions. This workflow will automatically run on every Pull Request, ensuring that no broken, malformed, or tampered-with prompts can ever be merged into your main branch.
The Goal: To create a CI/CD pipeline that automatically:
If either of these checks fails, the pipeline will fail, blocking the Pull Request from being merged.
This entire workflow is powered by two key Prompt Lockbox commands that are designed for automation:
Lint
The plb lint
command scans every single .yml file in your prompts/
directory. It checks for a wide range of issues, including:
name
or version
).Jinja2
syntax in your templates.If it finds any critical errors, it will exit with a non-zero status code (1)
, which is the signal that tells a CI/CD system to fail the job.
Verify
The plb verify
command is your security guard. It reads your project’s .plb.lock
file and compares the stored secure hashes against the current hashes of the files on disk.
It specifically checks for two dangerous conditions:
If it finds either of these issues, it will exit with a status code of 1
, failing the CI/CD job and protecting your production environment.
Now, let’s put these commands together in an automated workflow.
Create the Workflow File
In your project’s root directory, create a new folder path: .github/workflows/
. Inside that workflows folder, create a new file named prompt_qa.yml
.
Add the Workflow Content
Copy and paste the following content into your prompt_qa.yml file
. This YAML defines a GitHub Actions job that will run on every pull request targeting your main branch.
Commit and Push
Commit the prompt_qa.yml
file and push it to your repository.
Automation is Now Active!
That’s it! From now on, whenever someone opens a Pull Request, GitHub will automatically run these checks. You’ll see a new “Prompt Quality Assurance” check on your PR page. If it passes, you’ll get a green checkmark
. If it fails, you’ll get a red "X"
, and you can click “Details” to see the output from plb lint
or plb verify
to understand what went wrong.
By integrating these simple commands into a CI/CD pipeline, you elevate your prompt management from a manual process to a professional, automated system. This provides a powerful safety net, giving your ensurance that your prompts remain stable, secure, and reliable.