GitHub announces Pull Request Merge Queue

When you work for so long on the GitHub platform, you see signs nobody can see. It turns out we spotted weeks ago that GitHub was working on its own implementation of merge queues.

We were thrilled to see their announcement last week on their roadmap. Merge queues are finally coming natively in GitHub. Like auto-merge earlier this year, GitHub is slowly adding more and more features following Mergify's path.

What problem do they solve?

If you never heard about merge queues, don't be scared. It's normal, as they are still relatively new in the ecosystem. We wrote an extensive blog post about merge queues are and which issues they solve.

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

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To summarize, using a merge queue makes sure that you never merge an outdated pull request. You could break your continuous deployment by merging code that has not be tested with the latest version of its base branch. A merge queue prevents that by updating pull request before merging them.

Merge queues are becoming part of every software engineering team that wants to secure their merge and deploy workflow. Having GitHub recognizing that is a great thing, and they are actually cathing up on GitLab features in that regard.

We think merge queue is going to become a must-have in the next 10 years, like CI/CD became mandatory during the last 10 years.

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What to expect from GitHub merge queues?

GitHub posted some explanation about their feature and how they plan to provide. As we expected, it will be the logical continuation of the branch protection system they have been added over the years. Branch protections were already providing an option to force pull request to be up-to-date before merging. It's likely that using this option will also enable the use of a merge queue.

GitHub is also building a merge queue dashboard with the state of the queue and some interesting statistics about remaining time. This is a great feature to have to understand clearly the state of the queue.

We are eager to be able to try their implementation of the merge queue. While we expect GitHub merge queues to only cover a very tiny subset of the features and flexibility provided by Mergify merge queues, we're excited to be able to integrate Mergify even more with this new system.

And if you want to try a merge queue on your GitHub repository right away, you can give Mergify a try for free.