apm: Instructions file for GitHub Copilot

.github/instructions/tests.instructions.md

apm tests.instructions.md is an instructions file for GitHub Copilot from microsoft/apm. It costs 3,329 tokens per session, scanned A, original, MIT.

A testing rule for checking URLs with parsed components such as hostname, port, scheme, or path instead of searching for text inside the URL.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when writing tests that assert a URL, host, port, scheme, or path appears in output or matches an expected value.
Why use it?
It avoids unsafe or incomplete substring checks that can pass when a value appears in an unintended part of a URL and can trigger CodeQL findings.

Instructions file for GitHub Copilot ✓ vendor

Written for GitHub Copilot: a Copilot instructions file. Also seen: mentions Codex.

This is microsoft/apm's own configuration. It tells GitHub Copilot how to work on apm itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything apm configures →

Needs its repository: it runs a file that does not travel with it, so clone the repository first. The line is uv run --frozen python scripts/check_test_assertions.py.

About the project

APM is a package manager for AI-agent configuration, using a manifest to declare reusable instructions, skills, prompts, agents, hooks, plugins, and MCP components. Development teams use it to reproduce agent setups across projects and control their dependencies through policies and lockfiles, while the catalogue contains many of these agent components.

microsoft/apm · 4,133 stars · on GitHub · microsoft.github.io

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to microsoft/apm. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/apm/main/.github/instructions/tests.instructions.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/apm

Made for: GitHub Copilot.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

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Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for apm tests.instructions.md

Your own site · 80×15
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Per session 3,329 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 3,329 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.03329 $0.03329
Opus 5.5 $0.01332 $0.01332
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00666 $0.00666
Haiku 4.5 $0.00333 $0.00333

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 555f792adf02, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

apm tests.instructions.md scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 1mo ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

description: "Test conventions: URL assertions must use urllib.parse, never substring."
.github/instructions/tests.instructions.md · 331 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 331 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Test Conventions

URL assertions: use urllib.parse, never substring

Any assertion that a URL appears in or matches some output must parse the URL with urllib.parse.urlparse and compare on a parsed component (hostname, port, scheme, path). Substring assertions like assert "host.example.com" in msg or assert "https://x" in url are flagged by CodeQL as py/incomplete-url-substring-sanitization (high severity, "the string may be at an arbitrary position in the URL") and will fail CI.

This rule applies regardless of whether the value being asserted looks like a "safe" hostname — CodeQL is a static check and cannot infer that host in assert host in msg is bounded; the alert fires anyway.

Wrong

# Substring match -- CodeQL py/incomplete-url-substring-sanitization
assert "registry.example.com" in msg
assert "https://api.github.com/v0/servers" in url
assert "127.0.0.1" in warning_text

# Set membership of substring -- still flagged (CodeQL can't infer set type)
hosts = {urlparse(tok).hostname for tok in msg.split() if "://" in tok}
assert "poisoned.example.com" in hosts

Right

from urllib.parse import urlparse

# Direct hostname equality on a parsed URL token
urls = [tok for tok in msg.split() if "://" in tok]
assert len(urls) == 1
assert urlparse(urls[0]).hostname == "registry.example.com"

# Set equality (not membership) when multiple URLs are expected
hosts = {urlparse(tok.strip("()")).hostname for tok in msg.split() if "://" in tok}
assert hosts == {"a.example.com", "b.example.com"}

# Component-level checks for path / scheme / port
parsed = urlparse(url)
assert parsed.scheme == "https"
assert parsed.hostname == "api.github.com"
assert parsed.path == "/v0/servers"

Helper pattern for multi-URL output

When asserting against logger / CLI output that may contain multiple URLs, extract them with a small helper and assert on the parsed tuple:

def _printed_urls(text: str) -> list[tuple[str, str, str]]:
    """Extract (scheme, hostname, path) tuples from any URLs in text."""
    from urllib.parse import urlparse
    out = []
    for token in text.split():
        cleaned = token.strip("(),.;'\"")
        if "://" not in cleaned:
            continue
        p = urlparse(cleaned)
        out.append((p.scheme, p.hostname or "", p.path))
    return out

assert ("https", "registry.example.com", "/v0/servers") in _printed_urls(msg)

Read the full file on GitHub · 331 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 1mo ago First seen · 331 lines · 3,329 tokens per session scan A 555f792adf02

Subscribe to this mod's changes

apm tests.instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository microsoft/apm (4,133 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 3,329 tokens to every session, about $0.0133 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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