How does Danger JS work?

Danger provides an evaluation system for creating per-application rules. Basically, it is running arbitrary JavaScript with some extra PR metadata added in at runtime.

Actually doing that though, is a bit of a process.

Setup

Step 1: CI. Danger needs to figure out what CI we're running on. You can see them all in source/ci_source/providers. These use ENV VARs to figure out which CI danger ci is running on and validate whether it is a pull request.

Step 2: Platform. Danger needs to know which platform the code review is happening in. Today, Danger supports Github, Gitlab, BitBucket Server, and BitBucket Cloud. You can see them all in source/platforms.

Step 3: JSON DSL. To allow for all of:

danger ci to evaluate async code correctly
danger process to work with other languages
peril to arbitrarily sandbox danger per-run on a unique docker container

Danger first generates a JSON DSL. This can be passed safely between processes, or servers. For danger ci the exposed DSL is created as a DangerDSLJSONType and this is passed into the hidden command danger runner.

Step 4: DSL. The JSON DSL is picked up from STDIN in danger runner and then converted into a DangerDSLType. This is basically where functions are added into the DSL.

Step 5: Evaluation. With the DSL ready, the inline runner sets up a transpiled environment for evaluating your code, and adds the DSL attributes into the global evaluation context. The Dangerfile has the import {...} from 'danger' stripped, and then is executed inline.

Step 6: Results. Once the danger runner process is finished with evaluation, the results are passed back to the the platform. The platform then chooses whether to create/delete/edit any messages in core review.

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