Auto-update pull requests

uses: castastrophe/actions-pr-auto-update@v1

The goal of this action is to automatically update pull requests when their target branch is updated. This is useful when you have a long-running pull request that is not yet ready to be merged, but you want to keep it up to date with the target branch. Several customizations are available to control which pull requests are updated. Bot pull requests such as dependabot and closed pull requests are always ignored.

This project was forked from the cited repo below. This fork focuses on adding additional configurations and modernizing the tools and dependencies. ¹

Usage

For this action to run, you will need to ensure the access token used includes permission to update pull requests. This can be done by creating a personal access token with the pull-requests:write scope. This token can then be added as a repository secret and referenced in the workflow.

Create a new workflow file in your repository (e.g. .github/workflows/pr-update.yml).

name: Pull request update

on:
    push:
        branches:
            - main

jobs:
    autoupdate:
        runs-on: ubuntu-latest
        permissions:
            pull-requests: write
        steps:
        - uses: actions/checkout@v3
        - name: Update ALL THE PRS! 🎉
            uses: castastrophe/actions-pr-auto-update
            with:
                # defaults to github.token
                token: ${{ secrets.USER_TOKEN }}
                # Optional: include a limit to the number of PRs to update (default is 100)
                limit: 10
                # Optional: set this to true if you want to include draft PRs in those to be updated
                include_drafts: true
                # Optional: include a list of labels which, if present, will prevent the PR from being updated; these are comma-separated.
                exclude_labels: "do not update,skip update"
                # Optional: include a list of labels, at least one of which are required to be present for the PR to be updated; these are comma-separated.
                include_labels: "update,update me"

Once this is in place, every time a commit is pushed to one of the branches specified in your workflow, all pull requests targeting that branch (and that fall within the configured parameters) will be updated.

Inputs

Various inputs are defined in action.yml to let you configure this action:

Name	Description	Default
token	Token used to perform API calls. The token will require pull-requests:write access.	github.token
limit	The number of pull requests to update. Once the limit is hit, any pull requests remaining will not be updated. Pull requests are sorted by last updated date.	100
include_drafts	Whether or not to include draft pull rqeuests that are currently open.	false
include_labels	A comma-separated list of labels, at least one of which must be present on the pull request to be updated. If no labels are present, PR will be skipped.
exclude_labels	A comma-separated list of labels, where if at least one is present on the pull request to be updated, that PR will be skipped.

Have ideas for additional features? Open an issue!

Outputs

Outputs are defined in action.yml to let you access information about the action after it has run:

Name	Description
updated	The number of pull requests that were updated.
failed	The number of pull requests that failed to update.

Limitations

Due to rate limiting user token can only perform 5,000 requests per hour. This limit will vary based on the type of token used and the account level of the token owner.

Future work

• Add support for rebasing pull requests instead of merging
• Include a SHA check to ensure the pull request is not already up-to-date (or query for a needs-update flag?)
• Explore a chron-job approach to avoid rate limiting issues and keep logs clean (e.g. run once a day)

Contributions

Contributions are welcome! See the Contributor's Guide.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Citations

^[1] Forked from: maxkomarychev/pr-updater-action