Create Pull Request

Commit workflows so you create a commit without a Pull Request, such as if you want to commit on the main branch.

Create Pull Request action

Create Pull Request action

A GitHub action to create a pull request for changes to your repository in the actions workspace.

If you use this action, you don’t need a separate step to commit first, as this handles it for you.

The changes will be automatically committed to a new branch and a pull request created.

Usage:

steps:
  - name: Create Pull Request
    uses: peter-evans/create-pull-request@v3

All inputs are optional but you probably want to set some of these:

title for PR title.
branch for branch name to create.
delete-branch - Delete the branch when closing pull requests, and when undeleted after merging. Recommended as true. I don’t know how this compares to the settings of the repo. This optional might not be useful.

The docs recommend using a fix branch name, rather than one that is unique, to avoid to many branches/PRs.

With options:

steps:
  - name: Create Pull Request
    uses: peter-evans/create-pull-request@v3
    with:
      title: My PR title
      commit-message: My commit message
      branch: my-branch-name
      delete-branch: true

No action

Here we hit the GitHub API to create a PR.

We don’t actually make the commit or branch here - just the PR itself. See Commit recipes for making a commit.

Same repo

Note that GITHUB_TOKEN will be generated for you.

env:
  BRANCH_NAME: ${{ github.head_ref }}

jobs:
  create-pr:
    steps:
      - name: Create Pull Request
        run: |
          PAYLOAD=$(cat <<EOF
            {
              "title": "Title of my PR",
              "body": "Automated PR to ...",
              "head": "${BRANCH_NAME}",
              "base": "main"
            }
          EOF
          )
          curl https://api.github.com/repos/my-user/other-repo/pulls \
            --header "Authorization: token ${ TOKEN }" \
            -H "Content-Type:application/json" \
            -d "$PAYLOAD"
        env:
          TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Across repos

Note that here we are targeting a different repo to the current repo, so need a token to be specified as GH_TOKEN in secrets (don’t use the built-in GITHUB_TOKEN name.

env:
  BRANCH_NAME: ${{ github.head_ref }}

jobs:
  create-pr:
    steps:
      - name: Create Pull Request
        run: |
          PAYLOAD=$(cat <<EOF
            {
              "title": "Title of my PR",
              "body": "Automated PR to ...",
              "head": "${BRANCH_NAME}",
              "base": "main"
            }
          EOF
          )
          curl
            https://api.github.com/repos/my-user/my-repo/pulls \
            --header "Authorization: token ${TOKEN}" \
            -H "Content-Type:application/json" \
            -d "$PAYLOAD"
        env:
          TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GH_TOKEN }}

You can also do this:

-u my-user:$GITHUB_TOKEN

Related