Quick Start
Getting Started

Quick Start

Get Ferret reviewing your pull requests in under 5 minutes — no infrastructure required.

Zero-infrastructure start

The default config uses local file storage for RAG and requires only an Anthropic API key. You can add Qdrant, Pinecone, or other backends later.

Prerequisites

  • A GitHub or GitLab repository
  • An API key for at least one AI provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, etc.)
  • Optional for RAG: Ollama installed locally

Step 1 — Add the GitHub Actions workflow

Create the file below in your repository. Ferret will run automatically on every pull request.

.github/workflows/ferret-review.yml
yaml
on:
  pull_request:
    types: [opened, synchronize]
jobs:
  ferret-review:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      pull-requests: write
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - run: |
          curl -L https://github.com/Arunachalamkalimuthu/merlin-ai-code-review/releases/latest/download/merlin-linux-amd64 -o ferret
          chmod +x ferret && ./ferret review
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          ANTHROPIC_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.ANTHROPIC_API_KEY }}

Step 2 — Set repository secrets

Go to your repository → Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions and add:

SecretValueRequired
ANTHROPIC_API_KEYYour Claude API key (sk-ant-...)Yes (or another provider)
GITHUB_TOKENProvided automatically by ActionsYes

Step 3 — (Optional) Add ferret.toml

Drop ferret.toml in your repo root to customise the AI provider, focus areas, and more. Without it, Ferret uses sensible defaults.

ferret.toml
toml
[ai]
provider    = "anthropic"
model       = "claude-sonnet-4-6"
max_tokens  = 4096
temperature = 0.2
[review]
focus        = ["bugs", "security", "style", "performance"]
max_comments = 30
chunk_lines  = 200
reflect      = false

Step 4 — Open a pull request

Push a branch and open a PR. Ferret will trigger automatically and post inline comments within a few seconds. You can also trigger commands by commenting on the PR:

text
@ferret /review
@ferret /describe
@ferret /security
@ferret /ask Is this change thread-safe?

GitLab CI

See the Platforms page for a complete GitLab CI example and instructions for Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, and Gitea.

Next steps