The list of approvers is stored in a MAINTAINERS text file in the root of your repository. The maintainers file can be in either a text or HJSON format. The format is specified in the .checks-out file file and the default format is text.

You can inspect the maintainers file for your repository using the api endpoint /api/repos/[orgname]/[reponame]/maintainers. The output will have any github-org and github-team macros expanded (see below). If the maintainers file cannot be parsed then an error message will be returned.

Text format

The text format can be any of the following types.

Username, separated by newline:

foo
bar
baz

Username and email address, separated by newline:

foo <foo@mail.com>
bar <bar@mail.com>
baz <baz@mail.com>

FullName, email address and username, separated by newline:

Fooshure Jones <foo@mail.com> (@foo)
Bar None <bar@mail.com> (@bar)
Bazinga Smith <baz@mail.com> (@baz)

Directives for importing GitHub organizations and GitHub teams. These directives populate both the ‘people’ and ‘org’ fields with the correct values (see below).

github-org foo # loads organization foo
github-team bar # loads team bar within the organization of the repository
github-team bar foo # loads team bar from organization foo
github-org repo-self # loads the organization of the repository
github-team repo-self # loads all the teams of the repository

In the examples above the groups are automatically assigned the following names:

foo
bar
foo-bar
[name of organization]
[names of teams]

HJSON format

Human JSON format inspired by the Docker project. Organizations can be specified using this format.

The github-org and github-team directives can be used in the ‘group’ section but not in the ‘people’ section. These directives will populate the correct values into the ‘people’ section.

{
  people:
  {
    bob:
    {
      name: Bob Bobson
      email: bob@email.co
    }
    fred:
    {
      name: Fred Fredson
      email: fred@email.co
    }
    jon:
    {
      name: Jon Jonson
      email: jon@email.co
    }
    ralph:
    {
      name: Ralph Ralphington
      email: ralph@email.co
    }
    george:
    {
      name: George McGeorge
      email: george@email.co
    }
  }
  org:
  {
    cap:
    {
      people: [ "bob", "fred", "jon", "github-org cap" ]
    }
    iron:
    {
      people: [ "ralph", "george", "github-team iron" ]
    }
  }
}