This is a GitHub Action to check for #include guards in C/C++ header files.

We consider files with extensions .h, .H, .hh, .hpp, .cuh and .hxx as header files. In these files we check for the existence of constructs like

#ifndef SOME_NAME
#define SOME_NAME

where SOME_NAME is based on the file name according to a pattern that can be specified by the user.

Note that we do not really parse the preprocessor code, we just perform simple shell scripting. That means, you can easily trick the check script into false positives. However, why should you do that?

The base path to look for header files, for example src or include.

Default is the root of the repository, i.e., ..

The pattern to construct the macro name based on the file name.

The pattern is a simple string with some replacement fields, i.e., substrings in curly braces that will be replaced by (user-specified) and macrofied parts of the file name. Macrofication means that we transform all lower-case letters to upper-case and replace all non-alphanumeric characters by underscores (_).

Here is a list of available replacement field specifiers with an example for the file dir1/dir2/dir3/file.fuzz.hpp:

• {path}: DIR1_DIR2_DIR3_FILE_FUZZ_HPP
• {file}: FILE_FUZZ_HPP
• {file_ext}: HPP
• {file_base}: FILE_FUZZ
• {dirs}: DIR1_DIR2_DIR3
• {first_dir}: DIR1
• {last_dir}: DIR3

Note that it is always useful to use your project name as a prefix to avoid name clashes with header guards of other projects.

Default is {path}, which is useful if your path structure is like <project name>/<header file> or <project name>/<some category>/<header file>.

The regular expression for paths to check. Paths not matching this regular expression are ignored.

Three artificial examples:

• dir/\(foo\|bar\)\.h checks dir/foo.h and dir/bar.h only,
• ^v[0-9\.]\+/ checks paths beginning with a versional directory only,
• /.*/ checks paths with at least two directories only.

By default, all paths are checked.

The regular expression for paths to ignore. This is possibly a simpler way (than using only) to exclude files from checking.

By default, no paths are ignored.

A space-separated list of files for which the check failed.

Create a workflow file, e.g., .github/workflows/include-guards.yml, with the following content:

name: check-include-guards

on: [push, pull_request]

jobs:
  include-guards:
    name: Check include guards
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v4
    - name: Check include guards
      uses: sbeyer/[email protected]
      with:
        path: 'include/'
        pattern: 'PROJECT_{last_dir}_{file_base}'

You can also glance at other projects using this GitHub Action.