Update PR Branch Action

Automatically update the PR branch

The job of the action is to help click "Update branch" button for you. Designed to work with the auto-merge and "Require branches to be up to date before merging" options. It will update the newest open PR that match the below conditions

• The PR has the auto-merge option enabled
• The PR has 2 approvals and no changes-requested review (configurable)
• The PR has all checks passed (configurable)
• The PR branch has no conflicts with the base branch
• The PR branch is behind the base branch

When do you need this action

You may consider to use this action if you:

• Have enabled the auto-merge feature in your repo.
• Have checked the "Require branches to be up to date before merging" checkbox for protected branches. See more Require status checks before merging

Because of #2, even you have enabled auto-merge for a PR, the PR won't be automatically merged if the PR branch is behind the base branch, for example someone else merges another PR before your PR passes all CI checks. See the screenshot as below.

Inputs

token

Required

The personal access token.

Need to note, you can't use GITHUB_TOKEN because of this limitation

base

Required

Default: master

The base branch that the PR will use to fetch open PRs, for example, main, master or dev.

The action will only check PRs that use the base as the base branch.

required_approval_count

Required

Default: 2

The action will skip PRs that have less approvals than required_approval_count.

We could retrieve this value from the repo settings through an API call but that will incur one more request. GitHub has rate limit on API usage of GitHub actions.

require_passed_checks

Optional

Default: true

The action will skip updating PRs that have failed checks. Please note that if allow_ongoing_checks is set to false, the action will skip updating PRs with ongoing checks. This will result in the failure to update PR branches when the action is triggered while checks for those PRs are still in progress.

allow_ongoing_checks

Optional

Default: false

The action will consider PRs that have ongoing checks. This is useful when the action is triggered while checks for some otherwise qualified PRs are still in progress. Note, this option works only when require_passed_checks is set to true.

sort

Optional

What to sort results by. Can be either created, updated, popularity (comment count) or long-running (age, filtering by pulls updated in the last month).

Notice: this is an option provided by github rest api. In this github action, we simply proxy this parameter (and the direction paramter below). Check more here

direction

Optional

The direction of the sort. Can be either asc or desc. Default: desc when sort is created or sort is not specified, otherwise asc.

This github action doesn't set any default parameters.

require_auto_merge_enabled

Optional

Check if having auto-merge enabled in the PR is required, in order for the PR to be considered. It defaults to true, but if set to false, all PRs are considered for update (not just those with auto-merge enabled).

Example usage

name: PR update

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - 'master'
jobs:
  autoupdate:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Automatically update PR
        uses: adRise/update-pr-branch@VERSION_YOU_WANT_TO_USE
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.ACTION_USER_TOKEN }}
          base: 'master'
          required_approval_count: 2
          require_passed_checks: true
          allow_ongoing_checks: true
          sort: 'created'
          direction: 'desc'
          require_auto_merge_enabled: true

Replace the VERSION_YOU_WANT_TO_USE with the actual version you want to use, check the version format here

Development

yarn
# this compile index.js to dest/init.js for running
yarn build

Note: You need to run yarn build before commit the changes because when the action only use the compiled dest/index.js.