Checking out pull requests locally - GitHub Docs (original) (raw)

When someone sends you a pull request from a fork or branch of your repository, you can merge it locally to resolve a merge conflict or to test and verify the changes before merging on GitHub.

Who can use this feature?

Anyone with write access to a repository can pull a remote pull request down locally.

Modifying an active pull request locally

Modifying an inactive pull request locally

If a pull request’s author is unresponsive to requests or has deleted their fork, the changes proposed in that pull request can still be merged via a new pull request. However, if you want to make changes to a pull request and the author is not responding, you'll need to perform some additional steps to update the pull request.

Once a pull request is opened, GitHub stores all of the changes remotely. In other words, commits in a pull request are available in a repository even before the pull request is merged. You can fetch an open pull request and recreate it as your own.

Anyone can work with a previously opened pull request to continue working on it, test it out, or even open a new pull request with additional changes. However, only collaborators with push access can merge pull requests.

  1. Under your repository name, click Issues or Pull requests.
    Screenshot of the main page of a repository. In the horizontal navigation bar, the "Issues" and "Pull requests" tabs are outlined in orange.
  2. In the "Pull Requests" list, click the pull request you'd like to merge.
  3. Find the ID number of the inactive pull request. This is the sequence of digits right after the pull request's title.
    Screenshot of the title of a pull request. The pull request's ID number is outlined in dark orange.
  4. Open TerminalTerminalGit Bash.
  5. Fetch the reference to the pull request based on its ID number, creating a new branch in the process.
git fetch origin pull/ID/head:BRANCH_NAME
  1. Switch to the new branch that's based on this pull request:
[main] $ git switch BRANCH_NAME  
> Switched to a new branch 'BRANCH_NAME'
  1. At this point, you can do anything you want with this branch. You can run some local tests, or merge other branches into the branch.
  2. When you're ready, you can push the new branch up:
[pull-inactive-pull-request] $ git push origin BRANCH_NAME  
> Counting objects: 32, done.  
> Delta compression using up to 8 threads.  
> Compressing objects: 100% (26/26), done.  
> Writing objects: 100% (29/29), 74.94 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.  
> Total 29 (delta 8), reused 0 (delta 0)  
> To https://github.com/USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git  
>  * [new branch]      BRANCH_NAME -> BRANCH_NAME
  1. Create a new pull request with your new branch.

Error: Failed to push some refs

The remote refs/pull/ namespace is read-only. If you try to push any commits there, you'll see this error:

! [remote rejected] HEAD -> refs/pull/1/head (deny updating a hidden ref)
error: failed to push some refs to 'git@github.local:USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git'

Tip

When you remove or rename a remote reference, your local refs/pull/origin/ namespace will not be affected by calls to git-remote.