# Sign Off The House Way > Before opening a PR, know which contributor sign-off THAT house requires and make sure it's present — the contracts differ by house and a missing one is an instant, automated "didn't read the rules" bounce. Eclipse projects (e.g. Jetty) gate every PR on an ECA plus a DCO `Signed-off-by` trailer on each commit; Apache projects (Solr/Lucene) use a CLA with the committer resolving on merge and need no per-commit trailer; other houses need neither. Check the house's contract first, not after a bot rejects you. Use at front-gate, before the first commit. Trigger terms: DCO, ECA, CLA, Signed-off-by, sign-off, `git commit -s`, eca check, contributor agreement. - Skill: `serhiy-bzhezytskyy/sign-off-the-house-way` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add serhiy-bzhezytskyy/sign-off-the-house-way` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/serhiy-bzhezytskyy/sign-off-the-house-way/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Coding & Dev Tools - Author: serhiy-bzhezytskyy (https://skillmd.com/u/serhiy-bzhezytskyy) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/serhiy-bzhezytskyy/sign-off-the-house-way --- # Sign off the house way ## Purpose Every house has a legal-provenance contract for outside contributions, and it is enforced by a bot before a human ever looks at the change. Get it wrong and the PR lands with a red check and a canned rejection — you read as someone who didn't read the rules, which is exactly the "noise" signal this whole repo tries to avoid. The trap is assuming one house's contract is universal: a `Signed-off-by` trailer that Eclipse *requires* is simply noise in an Apache PR, and skipping it on an Eclipse PR blocks the merge outright. The contract is house-specific; learn it before the first commit, because a DCO trailer is set at commit time and is painful to add later (interactive rebase across every commit). ## When to use - Before the first commit on a repo you haven't contributed to before. - When a PR comes back with a red legal/agreement check (ECA, CLA, DCO). - When you're unsure whether to pass `-s` to `git commit`. ## When NOT to use This covers the legal SIGN-OFF contract; for the build/format/generator gate the house runs on your code, that's obey-the-houses-own-tooling. ## The practice (checklist) - [ ] Identify the house's contract before committing: check CONTRIBUTING, the PR template, and the checks that ran on a recent merged PR (`gh pr checks `). - [ ] **Eclipse (Jetty):** sign the ECA once under the same email you commit with, and add a DCO trailer to *every* commit — `git commit -s` (or `-s` on rebase). - [ ] **Apache (Solr/Lucene):** no per-commit trailer; the committer resolves the CLA/ICLA on merge. Don't add a `Signed-off-by` — it isn't the house convention. - [ ] Make the commit email match the agreement you signed (a mismatch fails the ECA even when the agreement exists). - [ ] If a legal check is red, fix it *before* pinging a human — it's your court. ## Rationalizations | Shortcut | Why it fails | |---|---| | "Sign-off is boilerplate, I'll add it if a bot complains." | The DCO trailer is set at commit time; retrofitting it means rebasing every commit. Do it up front with `-s`, not after a red check. | | "One house wanted `Signed-off-by`, so I'll always add it." | It's house-specific — required on Eclipse, not the convention on Apache. A stray trailer on an Apache PR reads as copy-paste from another project. | | "The legal check is red but the code is fine, a reviewer will wave it through." | Automated agreement gates don't get waved through; an unresolved ECA/CLA blocks merge regardless of code quality, and leaving it red is your unfinished move. | ## RECEIPT **Eclipse / Jetty — ECA + per-commit DCO, verified via `gh` 2026-07-24.** The `eclipsefdn/eca` check gates every PR and passed on #15435, #15472, and #15473: > "The author(s) of the pull request is covered by necessary legal agreements in > order to proceed!" and #15435 carries a `Signed-off-by` trailer on all 3 of its 3 commits (`gh pr view 15435 --repo jetty/jetty.project --json commits`). **Apache / Solr — CLA-on-merge, no per-commit DCO, verified via `gh`.** Merged PR #4632 carries **zero** `Signed-off-by` trailers — consistent with Apache's model where the committer resolves the agreement on merge and no per-commit sign-off is expected. Two houses contributed to in the same month, two different contracts. ## Lifecycle - **Signals it worked:** the legal check is green on first push; no rebase-to-add- sign-off round-trip; no "please sign the ECA/CLA" comment from a bot or maintainer. - **What to log on a misfire:** which house, which contract you got wrong (missing trailer / stray trailer / email mismatch), and what the gate said. Record it in [`LEDGER.md`](../../LEDGER.md). - **Death criterion:** retire for a house only if it drops its agreement gate entirely; the contracts themselves change rarely. - **Relates to:** a front-gate sibling of obey-the-houses-own-tooling — both are "read this house's rules before you touch it", one for the legal sign-off, one for the build/generator tooling.