DCO Sign-off Recovery

SkillDev tools

Lets your agent add a missing Signed-off-by trailer to commits so pull requests pass the DCO check.

Available today. Use it from your connected AI after setup.

Connect ahel once, and every AI you use reads what you have installed.

Then ask your AI: use the DCO Sign-off Recovery skill

About this capability

Recover from missing DCO sign-off on commits. Handles the single-commit amend, older-commit recovery via interactive rebase or cherry-pick, and explains the Probot DCO check that blocks PRs without sign-off. Use when a PR fails the DCO check, when a commit needs a Signed-off-by trailer added retroac

What this skill tells your AI

The instructions your AI receives, as published by linuxfoundation/crowd.dev in .claude/skills/dco/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.

All commits in this repo must carry a Signed-off-by: trailer (Developer Certificate of Origin). The Probot DCO check on PRs blocks merge until every commit is signed.

The standard way to add it is with --signoff at commit time. This skill handles the cases where that was missed.

Case 1: Last commit only

git commit --amend --signoff -S --no-edit
git push --force-with-lease

--force-with-lease is preferred over plain --force — it refuses if someone else has pushed to the branch since you last fetched.

Case 2: Older commit on the same branch

Find the commit hash of the oldest unsigned commit:

git log --pretty='%h %s %(trailers:key=Signed-off-by,valueonly)' origin/main..HEAD
# Any line with an empty trailing field is unsigned

Then interactively rebase from one commit before that:

git rebase -i <parent-of-unsigned-commit>
# In the editor, change `pick` to `edit` for each unsigned commit
# Save and exit; the rebase stops at each `edit` line so you can amend

For each commit in the rebase, replace it with a signed version:

git commit --amend --signoff -S --no-edit
git rebase --continue

When done, force-push:

git push --force-with-lease

Case 3: Cherry-pick / merge brought in unsigned commits

Cherry-pick with sign-off baked in:

git cherry-pick --signoff <sha>

If you already cherry-picked without it, fall back to Case 1 or Case 2 above.

Verifying the whole branch

Before pushing, verify every commit ahead of origin/main has both DCO and GPG:

git log --format='%G? %(trailers:key=Signed-off-by,valueonly,separator=%x20) %h %s' origin/main..HEAD

Each line must start with G or U (good GPG signature) AND carry a non-empty Signed-off-by value before the SHA. Codes N / B / E need investigation. See .claude/rules/commit-workflow.md for the canonical signing policy.

What the Probot DCO check looks for

The check passes when every commit message includes a Signed-off-by: Name <email> trailer matching the commit author's email. The --signoff (or -s) flag adds this trailer automatically using your user.name and user.email git config.

A failing DCO check on a PR will show a "Details" link explaining which commits are missing sign-off.

Signals

GitHub stars
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Forks
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Last commit
Sep 2026

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Catalog kind
skill
Gateway key
dco
Source
github.com/linuxfoundation/crowd.dev