About pull requests

Pull requests let you tell others about changes you've pushed to a branch in a repository on GitHub Enterprise. Once a pull request is opened, you can discuss and review the potential changes with collaborators and add follow-up commits before your changes are merged into the base branch.

Note: When working with pull requests, keep the following in mind:

If you're working in the shared repository model, we recommend that you use a topic branch for your pull request. While you can send pull requests from any branch or commit, with a topic branch you can push follow-up commits if you need to update your proposed changes.
When pushing commits to a pull request, don't force push. Force pushing can corrupt your pull request.

After initializing a pull request, you'll see a review page that shows a high-level overview of the changes between your branch (the compare branch) and the repository's base branch. You can add a summary of the proposed changes, review the changes made by commits, add labels, milestones, and assignees, and @mention individual contributors or teams. For more information, see "Creating a pull request."

Once you've created a pull request, you can push commits from your topic branch to add them to your existing pull request. These commits will appear in chronological order within your pull request and the changes will be visible in the "Files changed" tab.

Other contributors can review your proposed changes, add review comments, contribute to the pull request discussion, and even add commits to the pull request.

After you're happy with the proposed changes, you can merge the pull request. If you're working in a shared repository model, the proposed changes will be merged from the head branch to the base branch that was specified in the pull request. For more information, see "Merging a pull request."

If status checks are required for a repository, the required status checks must pass before you can merge your branch into the protected branch. For more information, see "About required status checks."

You can close corresponding issues using a keyword in your pull request or commit message. For more information, see "Closing issues using keywords."

Tips:

To toggle between collapsing and expanding all outdated review comments in a pull request, hold down alt and click Show outdated or Hide outdated. For more shortcuts, see "Keyboard shortcuts."
You can squash commits when merging a pull request to gain a more streamlined view of changes. For more information, see "About pull request merges."

You can visit your dashboard to quickly find links to recently updated pull requests you're working on or subscribed to. For more information, see "About your personal dashboard."

About pull requests

Further reading

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