Automations - reacting to bot PR comments

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1

I am interested in setting up an automation which watches for comments on PRs on one of my repos and is triggered when a comment is posted by a code review bot (e.g. CodeRabbit or Greptile). I can’t seem to get the automation to trigger; is there some limitation to the “PR commented” trigger which limits it to comments from non-bot users? I don’t really have a way to view potentially-triggering events and why they did or did not trigger an automation.

4

Hey, this is a known limitation, not a bug. Comments from bots and GitHub Apps are intentionally filtered out of PR comment triggers, mostly for security reasons, to avoid chained triggers and webhook spoofing.

Workarounds:

  • If you can control the bot identity, like in your own GitHub Action, use a PAT instead of GITHUB_TOKEN. Then the comment author will be a real user and the trigger will fire. Context: Github Actions commenting @cursor not being detected
  • For third-party SaaS bots like CodeRabbit or Greptile, where you can’t control auth, the only reliable option is a helper GitHub Action. It catches the bot’s review comment via a webhook event like pull_request_review_comment or issue_comment, then reposts the trigger comment like @cursor review as a real user via a PAT. Not super elegant, but it works.

On visibility, I agree. Right now it’s hard to tell why a specific event didn’t reach the trigger, since there’s no event log. I’ll pass this to the team as feedback, it’s come up before.

If you try option 2 and get stuck, share your Action config here and I’ll help.