This version of GitHub Enterprise was discontinued on 2021-03-02. No patch releases will be made, even for critical security issues. For better performance, improved security, and new features, upgrade to the latest version of GitHub Enterprise. For help with the upgrade, contact GitHub Enterprise support.

Troubleshooting required status checks

You can check for common errors and resolve issues with required status checks.

Protected branches are available in public repositories with GitHub Free and GitHub Free for organizations, and in public and private repositories with GitHub Pro, GitHub Team, GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and GitHub Enterprise Server.

If you have a check and a status with the same name, and you select that name as a required status check, both the check and the status are required. For more information, see "Checks."

After you enable required status checks, your branch may need to be up-to-date with the base branch before merging. This ensures that your branch has been tested with the latest code from the base branch. If your branch is out of date, you'll need to merge the base branch into your branch. For more information, see "About protected branches."

Note: You can also bring your branch up to date with the base branch using Git rebase. For more information, see "About Git rebase."

You won't be able to push local changes to a protected branch until all required status checks pass. Instead, you'll receive an error message similar to the following.

remote: error: GH006: Protected branch update failed for refs/heads/main.
remote: error: Required status check "ci-build" is failing

Note: Pull requests that are up-to-date and pass required status checks can be merged locally and pushed to the protected branch. This can be done without status checks running on the merge commit itself.