What’s New in Mergify, 2019Q4 Edition

This article is the second edition of our quarterly newsletter that summarizes everything that happened during the last quarter for Mergify.

This quarter was a busy period for us. We continued our growth at a steady pace and brought a lot of new users on board. We’re merging thousands of pull requests every week, and new repositories keep getting added every day!

We added a few fancy features to our engine, and I’ll talk about them just now.

Roadmap

As we announced a month ago, we now publish a public roadmap. It does not offer any timeline or anything fancy, but we wanted to make our best effort to make some of the work we do visible.

Better Branch Protection Support

GitHub branch protection mechanism is widely used nowadays. Many Mergify users started with this feature before switching to Mergify. Some users are still using Mergify with this feature.

Our engine was sometimes blocked by the protection when trying to merge pull requests, either because GitHub was too slow to realize the pull request was ready to merge, or because of configuration issues.

We’ve improved our engine to be smarter and fail less often. It also reports correctly issues related to branch protections if something’s wrong.

Concretely, that means that you can use a rule as simple as this:

pull_request_rules:
  - name: automatic merge when GitHub branch protection passes
    conditions:
      - base=master
    actions:
      merge:
        method: merge

With this rule and branch protection activated, Mergify will only try to merge the pull request on the master branch when the branch protection is validated.

Review Action

We’ve added a review action. You can now make Mergify review a pull request, either with approval, a request for changes, or a simple comment.

Request Review from Teams

You already could request a review from users, and you can now do so with teams. The request_review action gained a teams parameter where you can list the teams you want to look at your pull request.

Documentation Template

We’re working on hard on improving our documentation, and we started with getting it a fancier theme. We hope you like its new look.

The refresh command

As you should know, you can also control Mergify with commands. This is just done by writing a comment on your pull request to indicate the engine what to do.

We’ve added a refresh command. It simply re-triggers the rule evaluation engine. That’s quite handy when you want to retrigger Mergify on an existing pull request.

That’s it for this last quarter. We hope you’ll enjoy those new features and will come up with new fancy automation for your workflows. If you have any new ideas or feedback, feel free to reach us!