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Import Existing Policies and Procedures

If you already have policies and procedures documented outside of Openlane, you can import them using our bulk upload feature. We built this so you can quickly get your existing documentation into Openlane without manually recreating each policy or procedure.

Supported Formats​

Currently we support the following document types for import:

  • Markdown (.md, .mdx)
  • Microsoft Word (.docx, .doc)
  • Text files (.txt)

Import through Console​

To import your existing policies and procedures, follow these steps:

  1. From the Openlane console, navigate to either the Policies or Procedures section, depending on what you want to import
  2. Click the ... menu and choose Import existing document
  3. Select the file(s) you wish to import from your local machine. You can select multiple files at once and they will each be created as a separate policy or procedure
  4. Click Upload to start the import process
tip

The object names will be derived from the file names, for example access_control_policy.md will create a policy named Access Control Policy. You can rename the objects after import if needed. If using markdown, you can include title: in the frontmatter to set a custom title during import.

Continuous Sync from GitHub​

If your policies and procedures are stored in a GitHub repository, you can set up a sync to automatically import and keep them updated in Openlane.

tip

Refer to the automation demo - internal policies sync for a complete example of how to set this up

  1. Create a github action workflow using the theopenlane/setup-openlane action and run the sync command to sync your documents from GitHub to Openlane: 
    openlane internal-policy sync --file example.md -z json --host https://api.theopenlane.io
  2. Create an api token with the write scope and store it as a secret in your GitHub repository
  3. In your workflow, ensure the setup-openlane step specifies the token input using the secret you created
  4. Add policies to the repository in either .md or .mdx format and commit them to the repository
  5. When the workflow runs, it will create or update the policies in Openlane based on the files in the repository that have been added or changed. The content, minus the frontmatter, will be used as the policy details.

Frontmatter​

When syncing policies into Openlane from GitHub, the frontmatter will be used to track the openlane_id of the policies and has additional optional fields you can set such as title or status to sync these fields as well. Here is an example of frontmatter you can use in your markdown files:

---
openlane_id: 01K9QKFM6SGN7TTY3MA7SC6K17
title: Access Control Policy
status: DRAFT
---

When a new policy is added to your repo, the frontmatter can be empty and it will be populated after the first sync with the assigned openlane_id, title, and status of the created policy. Additional fields that are not supported will be ignored during the sync process.