Gate Pull Requests on a Drift Budget

A drift budget turns the DriftScore into a hard limit: if a pull request pushes drift past your agreed number, the scan fails and the PR is blocked. This is the cleanest way to stop upgrade debt from creeping in unnoticed.

Prerequisites

• The Vibgrate CLI already running in your CI pipeline.
• A DriftScore threshold your team agrees is acceptable.
• A protected branch where you can require status checks.

Steps

1. Pick a drift budget

Run a baseline scan locally to see your current DriftScore, then choose a budget at or slightly above it so existing code passes while new drift is caught.

vg scan

2. Run scan with --drift-budget

The --drift-budget flag sets the maximum allowed DriftScore. If the score exceeds the budget, the scan exits non-zero.

vg scan --drift-budget 60

A DriftScore at or below 60 passes; anything higher fails the command.

3. Wire it into the PR workflow

Add the budgeted scan to your pull request job so it runs on every PR.

      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npx @vibgrate/cli scan --drift-budget 60

4. Make the check required

In your branch protection settings, mark the Vibgrate job as a required status check. Now a failing budget blocks merge.

5. Confirm the gate via exit code

Locally, run the command and inspect the exit code. A non-zero code is what CI uses to fail the job.

vg scan --drift-budget 60

Verification

Open a PR that adds drift past the budget; the Vibgrate check should turn red and block merge. A PR within budget keeps the check green. The exit code is the source of truth: 0 means within budget, non-zero means over.

Next Steps

• Combine with a committed baseline using vg scan --baseline .vibgrate/baseline.json to gate on delta instead of absolute score.
• Post the DriftScore as a PR comment for reviewers.
• Upload results to Vibgrate Cloud with vg scan --push to track the budget trend over time.