Reviewing pull requests is one of the main ways people collaborate on GitHub. When you review a peer's work, you help catch issues early, share knowledge, and decide whether a change is ready to merge.
Commenting on changes
Anyone with read access can review and comment on proposed changes. As a reviewer, you can:
- Leave general feedback on the overall pull request.
- Comment on specific lines to ask questions or explain concerns.
- Suggest exact changes that the author can apply with a single click.
Review conversations appear in the pull request timeline so the whole team can follow the discussion and track decisions.
Requesting changes and approving
When you finish a review, you submit it with a decision that tells the author what to do next:
- Comment leaves general feedback without explicitly approving or requesting changes.
- Approve signals that the changes are ready to merge.
- Request changes flags feedback that the author should address before the pull request merges.
Reviewing changes with more depth
Thorough reviews go beyond reading the diff top to bottom. GitHub gives you tools to review large or complex changes with precision:
- Review one file at a time, mark each file as Viewed to collapse it, and use the progress bar to track how much of the pull request you've covered.
- Assess security and dependencies. Dependency review shows how a pull request changes dependencies and whether it introduces known vulnerabilities, and code scanning surfaces alerts on the proposed changes.