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).
It seems to me that you can only see the vulnerable dependencies on the master branch. I fixed those mentioned in the alert on a separate branch and want to check if in fact the vulnerable dependencies are fixed, so what I really need is to be able to check the alert for the specific branch, can this be done?
I had this same issue.
The problem with GitHub's Security Alert feature is that it will always scans the default branch of a repository. This is normally the master branch. Therefore, any changes to resolve security issues made to other branches will not be recognised by GitHub.
The workaround.
You can change the default branch to be any branch in your repository! Including the one you have done the work to resolve the security issues.
On GitHub, navigate to the main page of the repository.
Under your repository name, click Settings.
In the left menu, click Branches.
Choose the new default branch.
Once you have changed the default branch to the branch you have done the resolving work on, GitHub's Security Alert feature will start to scan that branch.
And you should see the security alerts that you have resolved disappear.
Afterwards you can change the default branch back to the master branch and only change it when you are specifically working on resolving security vulnerabilities.
The security alerts for vulnerable dependencies reported by GitHub might be valid only for the default branch (usually master, but you can change it).
If you are not ready to merge your fix to the default branch of your repo, one workaround would be to push that branch to the default (again, usually master) branch of a new dedicated (and temporary) repository, just to check if any new alerts are detected on that new repo.
Update Oct. 2020, 2+ years later: Michael Greisman points out in the comments to this GitHub Community answer and the documentation "About alerts for vulnerable dependencies".
It confirms that the scan is done against the default branch.
"Once the fix... is merged into the default branch... GitHub will schedule a new scan of your project’s dependencies".
Background
I am using GitHub Enterprise.
I want to check unused branches in my repository, and ask owners of these unused branches to clean-up.
You can see "Your branches" (branches created by current user) on “Branches” page in GitHub. So I think GitHub might have information for who created a branch.
On the other hand, the result of GitHub REST API (https://developer.github.com/v3/git/refs/#get-a-reference) does not contain the creator of the specified branch.
Question
Is there’s any way to get the user who created a branch with GitHub API?
There is no real "ownership" associated to a branch with Git/GitHub.
As mentioned in the documentation, "Your branches" reference in a repository the branches you have push access to, not necessarily the ones you have "created".
The best you can do is, if you have access to a local clone, a simple git fetch, followed by:
git for-each-ref --format="%(committerdate) %09 %(refname:short) %09 %(authorname)" --sort=-committerdate refs/remotes/origin
That will list the remote branches from the most recent updated one to the oldest, with the author of the last commit on each branch.
But if you have to use GitHub API, then you would need to:
list the remote branches,
then for each one get the commit mentioned with the branch
You can then contact the committer of that most recent commit.
I created a repo on Github and made some commits from the Github windows app, I checked that my email is in sync with my account.
In the "Repositories contributed to" tab I can only see third party repos but not ones created by me...
Does Github not count repos self created as "Contributions"? If they do, how can I show my commits in the "Repositories contributed" to tab?
Does Github not count repos self created as "Contributions"?
It does, but not in the list of "repositories contributed to".
That list is only for the repos your forked, made a PR (Pull Request) which was accepted and merged in the original repo.
Your own commits are counted in the contributions graph only if (see GitHub help page) all the conditions are met:
The commits were made within the past year.
The email address used for the commits is associated with your GitHub account.
The commits were made in a standalone repository, not a fork.
The commits were made in the default branch of the repository.
We use GitHub for our project and are happy with it.
I often browse the project website to check what my friends are doing on the project, and the dashboard lists the last commits on the master branch of all repositories I contribute to.
This is well and nice, but most of the work happens on other branches then get merged.
Any idea how to pin what happens to these branches on the dashboard?
Beside changing the default branch of a GitHub repo (which isn't what you need), you could also set an RSS feed: see "Setting up an Github Commit RSS feed"
https://github.com/username/repository_name/commits/branch_name.atom?login=login&token=token