Github has the option to allow a PR to be squashed when merged ("Squash and Merge")
Is there anyway I can configure the branch so it only allows the "Squash and Merge" option?
My scenario is this
we have a develop branch, that feature requests are pushed to
sometimes developers will forget to choose "Squash and Merge" and will commit their feature branch, with 10-20 tiny commits to the develop branch.
These changes eventually get merged to master, and feature history becomes hard to read
I have looked in hooks in branch protection rules, but didn't see any such option
Unfortunately the option to change what type of PR merge is available on Github is set on a per repo basis. Since PRs are a github thing, not a git thing, I can't think of a way that you'd be able to do anything with githooks either.
I don't see a great option for your workflow as long as you require the intermediate develop branch that eventually gets merged into master. Workflows that have multiple layers of PRs get messy on Github. The one real option would be that you require squash to merge on Github PRs and then the regular merge from develop to master happens outside a PR (could be local on a machine or via a Github action potentially).
But, your best option if this is really a big problem may be to modify your workflow. One common workflow would be that master is the development branch. Then when it is time for a release a release branch or tag, depending on your needs, is created from master. The you will have no issue turning on the repo wide requirement for squashing.
I find this missing feature in GitHub to be frustrating, so I'm documenting my work-around here to help the next person. Alternate, better work-arounds are welcome.
This question is not a duplicate of How to change the author of a commit in GitHub? ...because that question isn't clear if it is asking about how to rewrite the author of a few commits and the push those to github, or actually change the name under which the entire PR was created in the first place. And, the accepted answer to that question was a simple fix to the local .git/config file, which clearly will not solve the GitHub problem I'm talking about here.
At the top of a GitHub PR you'll see something like this:
username wants to merge 1 commit into base_branch from their_feature_branch
That username: how can we change that?
Example PR (chosen "at random" from GitHub, just to show the PR author line in the image below). Image:
Example use-cases:
The team-mate who opened this PR just left the company, and we'd like to commandeer (take over) and finish the PR for them.
Change of work-loads have necessitated you take over a partially-complete PR from another team-mate. How can you switch that PR to be in your name?
Assume that everyone has full push access to the whole repo, meaning that you can push/pull to/from each other's branches anyway.
Real-life example of why I want to know how to change the owner of an open PR
In 2020 a peer of mine opened a PR on a brand new branch that was intended to be worked on for 3 months until it had a ton of new features in it. Then, it would be merged. Peer reviews would occur on mini-PRs as they go into this separate, long-running, stand-alone branch.
The PR was initially opened with a "do not review" label, just to get the branch up so our CI (Continuous Integration) system would start to build it daily to ensure it wasn't broken. We would all then contribute to this branch with the understanding that the one person who opened it would be the "process owner" and walk the branch through all testing and processes until it gets merged back into the main branch.
My peer then left the company right after opening this PR. I immediately became the process owner and worked on the PR for 3 months and eventually merged it. That repo is set up by the maintainers to disable all types of merges except "squash merges" (see my comments under this question), so when it was merged, Github squashed all of the dozens of individual commits into one single huge commit and attached my peer's name (and keep in mind he hadn't been at the company for the last 3 months) to that commit, even though it was the commit that I had managed for nearly all of its 3 month lifetime.
git diff --shortstat 123456789abcd~..123456789abcd shows the following output:
164 files changed, 10360 insertions(+), 3013 deletions(-)
...meaning that commit had touched 164 files, added 10360 lines, and deleted 3013 lines. And guess what!? My peer's name is the name on all those changes, just because he opened the PR initially, instead of my name, even though a lot of that work was mine and I was the process owner of it. That's confusing, to say the least. I would have liked to have my name on all of those changed lines instead.
My answer here is therefore what I should have done, but didn't at the time, because I didn't know GitHub always uses the name of the person who opened the PR, and I didn't know how to change the owner of the PR. Now, I do know, and I have documented my workarounds in my answer.
What I actually did was option 1 from my answer, but what I should have done is option 2 from my answer.
Sometimes, an assignment gets passed off from one team member to another, or, a team member leaves a team. When this happens, it would be nice to "commandeer", or take over, their PR so that it becomes your PR. As far as I can tell, however, this isn't possible on GitHub yet.
On Phabricator (a paid alternative to GitHub, and originally an internal tool used at Facebook), this is as simple as clicking a button to "Commandeer Revision" (see old documentation here under "Take over another author's change"). This is known as "commandeering someone's diff", where "diff" here is the Phabricator-equivalent to a GitHub PR, or "Pull Request".
How to commandeer (take over) someone else's PR in GitHub
ie: how to change the owner of the open PR so it looks like you opened the PR, not them.
So, since GitHub doesn't allow commandeering a PR, here are some options:
Continue using their open PR, in which case their name, not yours, gets attached to the final, squashed-and-merged commit in the event you use the "Squash and merge" option to finish the PR. If they did the bulk of the work, that's fine. But, if you are taking over a PR and you are doing the bulk of the work, you'd probably like your name to be attached to the work. So, instead:
Just close their open PR and open your own.
To do option 1 above: just keep using their open PR, in which their name gets attached to the final, squashed merge commit:
Check out their branch locally
git fetch origin their_branch_name
git checkout their_branch_name
Optionally, rename your local copy of their branch to something you like
git branch -m new_branch_name
Set the upstream for this branch so that when you git push it will push to their remote branch name which is attached to their open PR:
git push --set-upstream origin new_branch_name:their_branch_name
Note: I learned the git push -u origin local_FROM_branch:remote_TO_branch syntax here: How can I push a local Git branch to a remote with a different name easily?
See also my own new answer to that question here.
Now, to push you can just call:
git push
And to pull from that branch, in case another team-mate pushes changes to it too, you can specify:
git pull origin their_branch_name
Now, whenever the PR is complete and reviewed, you can merge it via GitHub. If you choose the regular merge option you'll get credit for your commits. If you choose the "squash and merge" option, the original author, NOT you gets full credit for the entire merge. This is dumb and should be fixed by GitHub, but, that's how it is.
[My preference] Here's how to do option 2 above: just close their PR and open your own:
Go to the bottom of their PR and click "Close pull request": .
Check out their branch locally
git fetch origin their_branch_name
git checkout their_branch_name
Optionally, but recommended, rename your local copy of their branch to something you like.
git branch -m new_branch_name
Push this as a new branch to the remote origin on GitHub. This pushes to your remote branch and allows you to open a NEW PR under YOUR name on GitHub:
git push --set-upstream origin new_branch_name
# Note: if you didn't rename the branch to `new_branch_name` above,
# and it is therefore still called `their_branch_name` locally, just
# use `their_branch_name` here instead.
After pushing like that for the first time, GitHub will output a URL in the terminal where you pushed, which you can click on to open a new PR under your name. (If you don't have this feature, just go to Github.com and manually open up a PR there). Open a PR and voilá! It's now YOUR PR and you've just "commandeered" their PR!
Now, to push you can just call:
git push
And to pull from that branch, in case another team-mate pushes changes to it too, you can specify:
git pull origin new_branch_name
Now, when the PR is complete and reviewed, you can merge it on GitHub. If you choose the "squash and merge" option, your name will now be used for the final, single commit which gets merged to the base_branch.
See also:
How can I push a local Git branch to a remote with a different name easily?
[my own new answer I just added there] How can I push a local Git branch to a remote with a different name easily?
Just giving An example when this ability will be a necessary feature:
One of the PRs I Owned had state errors, that are not a part of the branch, but are localized to the PR:
>> git checkout -b new_name;
>> git push origin new_name;
>> opened new PR without errors.
The errors are not in GitHub per-se, but in some plugins and extensions we made for testing environment.
But I want the IT team to debug the state-corruption, so I would like to pass my PR onto them (the PR but not the code or the branch, obviously).
The problem I have is as follows:
I rebase locally, push changes to remote and open a PR
While the review is in progress, some other review is finished and those changes are merged into master
My PR is now behind the master and the only way I can update it is to rebase it locally and force push the changes, which GitHub generally warns us to avoid, but specifically, the only issue we have is that we can't use "Show changes since your last review" - the issue I need to solve.
As far as I'm aware, there are three possible solutions:
There is a way I am not aware of to rebase my PR via the GitHub interface and then pull it locally, which helps with this issue
I should move to an alternative, e.g. GitLab - not an option in my case
Something third I have no clue about :D
I'm having an issue where GitHub doesn't automatically rebase/merge my pull requests at all, even if commits to master since the PR branch was created don't even touch the same files the PR itself touches, so there aren't any merge conflicts at all.
I know this is possible in GitHub, I've encountered a few repositories myself where PRs don't require a rebase and merge conflicts are automatically resolved.
The repository in question is here.
I've tried going through the project settings but I cannot seem to find a setting that says that this is an issue. Also, if I rebase my PRs manually, it usually happens automatically without me being prompted to resolve any conflics.
This is configured in the required status checks section, found in Settings → Branches → Protected Branches. The relevant setting is "Require branches to be up to date before merging".
If this feature is enabled, and status checking is set to "strict" (it is by default), then
you'll need to bring the head branch up to date after other collaborators merge pull requests to the protected base branch.
I have modified the default branch of a particular project to develop, instead of the default master. However, commits to the develop branch including the closure messages are not closing issues (even though the automatic linkage between issue and commit is functioning).
Do I need to somehow explicitly link issues to this branch? The documentation only refers to the default branch.