Instant CI/CD Policy Enforcement with Open Policy Agent and GitHub

Open Policy Agent (OPA) can turn every pull request into a checkpoint. It evaluates rules before a merge, stopping insecure or non-compliant code from ever hitting production. With OPA integrated into a GitHub CI/CD workflow, controls are automated, repeatable, and enforced across every repo without exception.

OPA works by defining policies in Rego, a declarative language made for making yes/no decisions. In GitHub Actions or other CI/CD pipelines, these policies run as part of the build. They check for criteria like dependency approval, code coverage, artifact signing, or infrastructure configuration. If the code doesn’t meet the standard, the pipeline fails. No human gatekeeper needed.

CI/CD controls built with Open Policy Agent reduce drift between environments. By storing policies in version control alongside application code, you gain visibility and auditability. Every policy change is reviewed like any other code change, and GitHub makes it easy to test them in pull requests before going live.

To integrate OPA into GitHub CI/CD:

1. Write Rego policies defining your governance and security rules.
2. Add the OPA CLI or a container image to your workflow steps.
3. Run opa eval or conftest against your target files, configs, or build artifacts.
4. Use workflow exit codes to block merges on policy failures.

This setup scales across any number of repositories. Organizations can share a central policy repo, apply it to all pipelines, and ensure consistent CI/CD controls for compliance, security, and quality. With OPA, these checks happen in milliseconds at commit time, not hours in manual reviews.

Tight policies are not a burden when they are codified, tested, and distributed automatically. They let teams deploy faster because trust is built into the pipeline.

See how instant OPA CI/CD controls work with GitHub. Try it on hoop.dev and have it running in minutes.