The Mergify Blog

Launching our Startup Program

Today, Mergify is proud to announce its Startup Program, aiming to help every startup scale its business and become more prominent. Why are we launching a Startup Program?At Mergify, we know what it is to be a startup. We know how hard it is to find a place for

GitHub Branch Protection: What It Is and Why It Matters

GitHub offers a great deal of flexibility for more collaborative development among more widely distributed teams. Now, anyone can work together on a single codebase without losing track of other contributors’ progress in relation to their own. However, this flexibility can actually prove to be more of a problem than

Changelog

Mergify Changelog 2021Q3

Time flies, and this is the last update before we close the 2021 year. That's exciting! This quarter was no exception to the rule, and Mergify continued to grow in its number of users, repositories, and automated pull requests. We're thrilled to see more and more users leveraging our engine

GitHub

Understanding the GitHub Pull Request Workflow

GitHub allows developers around the world to streamline their development pipelines and maintain a solid history of their projects even while collaborating with many other individuals and teams. However, Git can only take a team so far; it’s a tool that can be used effectively or ineffectively, depending on

Features

Strict Mode Deprecation

When Mergify started to automate pull request merges, users expressed rapidly the need for having a way to keep their pull requests updated. We soon introduced the strict mode for the merge action, offering pull request merge serialization. This was our first, very basic, merge queue. Later, Mergify introduced the

GitHub

How to solve Linus Torvalds' issues about GitHub

While Linus Torvalds is well-known for Linux, he's also reputed for not having his tongue in his pocket. He is often complaining loudly about what he thinks is wrong or damageable to the industry. As the creator of Git 15 years ago, it's interesting to hear what he recently stated

GitHub

Handling 780k GitHub events per day

A year ago, we wrote about our workload issues and how we were handling 300k GitHub events per day. Our main challenge was avoiding GitHub rate limit and quota system while delivering service with low latency and high throughput. Earlier this year we noticed more and more issues handling our

Git

What Is a Git Merge Fast Forward?

A Git fast forward is an extremely useful and efficient mechanism for harmonizing your project's main branch with changes introduced in a given feature branch. Git makes ample use of fast-forwarding merges behind the scenes, speeding up your development workflow in the process. Fast-forward merges can help keep your commit

GitHub

The Best GitHub Productivity Tools

To get the most out of GitHub, it helps to choose the right tools. Developer productivity tools abound, but not all of them are worth adopting to improve your workflow. You can use the best productivity tools for programmers to enhance almost any part of your development process, including getting

Open-Source

The Next Decade of Continuous Integration

I remember officially switching my professional career from being a Linux system administrator to a Python software engineer. It was ten years ago when I decided that rebooting servers was dull. Watching the software engineering team working next to me, seeing them doing git commit -a -m 'friday night commit'

Features

Behind the scene of time-based conditions

Last month, we announced a new set of conditions for Mergify rules based on time. You can now use a time and date and compare pull request attributes to dates and times. We had the idea for this feature since the beginning of Mergify, but we delayed it for a

Git

How to Resolve a Merge Conflict?

GitHub makes collaborating with many different people on a single piece of code or software much easier by managing the details involved in version control alongside your project's evolving history. This makes it especially useful for comparing code changes as they come in and sorting out differences between code submissions

Open-Source

Which Open Source License Should You Use for GitHub Project?

Choosing a distribution license for the software you publish on GitHub can seem confusing at first. After all, there are quite literally hundreds of licenses to choose from, all of which are suitable for different purposes and grant users of your code unique rights. For first-time code publishers, it can

Changelog

Mergify Changelog 2021Q2

The second quarter of 2021 has finished. As usual, we got pretty busy and shipped a lot of new features. This quarter has been marked by a massive increase in our number of users and, therefore, our workload. We spent quite some time preparing for significant improvements in our processing

Git

Code Review Best Practices

Adopting the right code review best practices can drastically speed up your review process while also improving the quality of your reviews. Often enough, code reviews can become areas of contention among members of your team, prompting them to become defensive about work they’ve done or changes they may

Features

Announcing Time-based Conditions

Today, we're happy to announce the general availability of one of our most awaited features. Expressing conditions to act upon is the core of Mergify rules. While many dimensions are exposed through our configuration file and allow us to filter on many pull request attributes, one important was missing. Time.

GitHub

How to Pick your GitHub Merge Methods

GitHub merge methods can be tough to choose correctly. Implementing the wrong merge method on your project's main branch can detract from your team's ability to follow along and contribute. In other words, using the wrong merge method for the occasion defeats the entire purpose of Git—namely, seamless collaboration

Features

Announcing Boolean Operators in Conditions

Over the years, Mergify users wish they could be more expressive in the way they write their pull request rules. As those rules are a combination of conditions, being able to use or and and operators inside those expressions is a must-have. We are pleased to announce that this long-awaited

Git

How To Write Good Commit Messages

Good commit messages make a big difference in your team's ability to stay on top of changes to your codebase. However, coming up with useful and understandable messages is often easier said than done, especially when you’re hard at work. Luckily, there are a few tricks to getting your

Use Case

How To Automatically Merge GitHub Security Updates

Managing security updates on GitHub can get hectic in a hurry as third-party dependencies develop at their own pace, separate from your project. Leaving vulnerable dependencies unpatched can open your entire application up to otherwise avoidable threats, but manually reviewing and merging such updates can quickly eat up all of

GitHub

The Best GitHub Actions You Should Use

GitHub Actions are a collection of tools that help you streamline your development workflows through automation. These actions are event-driven, meaning they’ll trigger upon certain things happening. There are tons of GitHub Actions you can use—here are some of the best. 1. CheckoutEverybody knows about Checkout. It's the

Git

What is a Merge Queue?

Do you happen to know the common point between the open-source Node.js and Rust projects, the sporty social network Strava, the e-commerce company Shopify and the ride-hailing company Uber? Their engineering team all rely on a merge queue. Well, if you never heard of such a concept, you might

GitHub

The Essential GitHub CLI Commands

Last September, GitHub launched GitHub CLI 1.0 and brought GitHub to the terminal. GitHub CLI is GitHub command-line interface. It brings pull requests, issues, and other GitHub concepts to the terminal next to where you are already working with Git and your code — according to its documentation. In this

Git

What's the Best Git Merge Strategy?

Once developers have completed work on project features and you’ve approved their pull requests, it’s time to merge those requests into the main project repository. When doing so, Git has to find a base commit shared by two or more commits and then connect the two branches. Git

GitHub

Replacing Dependabot Preview auto-merge feature

We all knew it was going to happen anyway. GitHub just pulled the plug and removed Dependabot Preview. Dependabot was absorbed by GitHub 2 years ago now, and it seemed logical to phase out the Preview version of it. More than 30,000 organizations relied on this fabulous tool to