Rebase error "This branch cannot be rebased due to too many changes"

[JeanRemiDelteil]

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I have a Pull Request that got this error when trying to "merge & rebase"

This branch cannot be rebased due to too many changes

The repository has the policy to only be able to "merge and rebase", and the target branch is protected, so we are a bit stuck !
Before merging this by force with an admin, I would like to try and understand why we are getting this error !

Are there any hard limitations (I did not find any) that we have to be mindful of ?
Like number of commit, of changes, of files changed ?

For the record, here are these metrics for the problematic PR:

• Commits: 39
• Files changed: 706
• Changes: +5,639 / - 5,487

We have PR with more changes that were able to rebase without any issue ! (32 commit, 1500 files with +/-15,000 changes).

[matijs]

I'm observing the same issue for a PR with 1 commit, 1 file, and +12 changes.

Thankfully I can squash and merge which works fine, but I would like to understand why I am seeing this error.

[nik-mort]

I'm also seeing the same issue, only for me, not others working in the repo, but even on branches with one file and +1 line change.

[matijs]

I have successfully used "rebase and merge" on a Dependabot PR in a completely different repo. It does seem like something fishy is going on so I have filed a bug and hope that helps GH to figure out what's going on.

[GuilhermeManzano2]

I'm facing this issue too in my PR and the target branch is protected. Did you have any news about this problem?

[matijs]

As of today this seems to be working as expected again. No more mentions of too many changes.

[dimip1606]

Same problem here.

[Goooler]

See it at Goooler/compiler-explorer#3.

[leovidal73]

Same problem here for only 1 commit, 1 file, +8 lines.

[travisfraser]

The issue comes and goes for me. Recreation of the branch solves nothing.

[dghubble]

Same issue here, on a new PR with only a few lines of diff

[Lutsykm]

Same issue :(

[dghubble]

I had to close PRs opened during the incident, delete the branch, restore the branch, and reopen. Which solved for me

[Lutsykm]

I found that when using the GitHub mobile app, this error does not occur so I can rebase

[leovidal73]

The workaround suggested by @aimee-esler worked for me : https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/51612#discussioncomment-6554628

[Oucema90]

Same issue - I changed the base branch to something else and then back to my desired branch and it fixed the problem

Thank you @aimee-esler 🚀

[evanjmg]

This does not work for most cases. Creating a new branch with a new commit is the only solution. To reproduce the but simply git commit --amend --no-edit and push up

[evanjmg]

This is blocking all my prs now and have no workaround. Above workarounds don't work. To reproduce I just amend my commit :(

[rmadlal]

Same here. Nothing that was suggested here works.

[Pawel-Cieslak]

Same, seems like this issue started to appear since yesterday incident https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/mbvjmqbcb1xk
It can block rebase merge even when pull request contains only 1 commit, and only 1 line has been changed

[alanoe]

Same here. We never had this issue and it started to appear today.

[Sconvai]

Same here. Please could you provide some update or link to incident.

[skonieczny]

Same for me, 1 little commit. Rebasing/squashing locally does not help.

[obadasemary]

I have the same issue also right now. I tried to open and close the PR, and it doesn’t effect
also, I tried to do another work in another branch, which gave me the same issue when I wanted to rebase it.

Do you know what we should do?

[obadasemary]

[coquer]

Did you ever found out what is going?

[JPBM135]

An possible workaround is:

• Close the PR
• Delete the branch
• Restore the branch
• Reopen the PR

[RomanBredehoft]

Got the same here for +10,-9 changes ! As some pointed out by some, this simple workaround works fine :

• click on edit next to the PR's title
• click on the base branch and pick the same branch
• click on "change base"

Not the first time I use this trick to fix some PR issues by the way, it's quite useful

[glenngijsberts]

Changing the base branch did not work for me, closing the branch, removing the branch, restoring the branch and re-opening did not work either. Creating a new branch from main and cherry picking a commit did also not work. Ended up merging it with the mobile app :/

[hoorelbeke-jimmy]

It doesn't work for me on the mobile app either

[davidln777]

Workaround fix: GoTo Edit -> change base branch to something other than master --> change the base branch back to master.

[dennisschneider]

worked for me

[edosrecki]

Works.

[glenngijsberts]

Doesn't work for me.

[Illizian]

this worked for me too.

[hoorelbeke-jimmy]

Doesn't work for me too

[Illizian]

+1

Same here; with a 1 File [+4 −0] PR. Confirming locally that there were no issues. I edited the base branch (as suggested above) to a random branch and back again - this resolved the issue.

[matijs]

Out of the blue this happened again today. Thankfully squashing and merging still works as a workaround but it's still unclear as to what's causing this.

[debersonpaula]

Same here, Rebase and Merge is not working and we are stuck also on This branch cannot be rebased due to too many changes

[strazan]

Got same just now as well

[nv30]

+1

[baptiste-bergmann-maxa]

Same issue here with 2 File [+13 −14] changes

[origamiimaster]

Same issue is occurring for me, a pull request with one file, one line deleted is now saying "This branch cannot be rebased due to too many changes".

[coryfklein]

Anybody else seeing this again today?

[geoff-maddock]

I see it intermittently, including today, yes.

[kubilaykarpat]

We experience this today. These workarounds do not work:

• Changing target branch
• Reopening
• Using mobile app

We basically cannot merge any PR because merging is disabled in our repo.

[AxelRICHARD]

Same here

[thesuperzapper]

@mariorod @kdaigle can you please take a look into why the Pull Requests team is refusing to fix this long-standing critical bug?

It has been open since March 2023 and is a showstopping bug for many users of GitHub as it makes it impossible to rebase PRs using the UI.

Reproduction Steps

1. Enable the "always suggest updating pull request branches" config for the repo
2. Create a "branch protection rule" that prevents merge commits:
   • enable: "require linear history" and "do not allow bypassing the above settings"
3. Create a pull request into main from a branch matching the rule
4. Make a commit on main so that the PR needs to be "updated"
5. Click the "Update Branch" button, and ignore the error that pops up:
   • 
   • 
6. Refresh the page and observe that "Rebase" is now blocked with the error:
   • This branch cannot be rebased due to too many changes.
   • 
7. It is now impossible to use the UI to rebase this PR

Sort-of Workaround

You can sometimes get the PR out of this state by forcing GitHub to "refresh" the PR by doing the following:

1. Click "edit" at the top of the PR (beside the name)
2. Change the base to the same as the source (which will cause an error, but will refresh the PR)
3. Observe that you can now click the dropdown and rebase.
   • 

[thesuperzapper]

@ashtom, @mariorod can you please get someone to look into this, this is clearly a bug in the GitHub UI itself, and it's crazy that it's not solved.

[queenofcorgis]

@thesuperzapper,

Please note, contacting any member of GitHub Staff via unsolicited mentions or pings is strongly discouraged and may be considered a violation of our prohibition against harassment. Please review our Code of Conduct for more information.

Let's work together to keep GitHub Community a place where people feel safe to participate by being respectful of them and their time.

Any repeat and future violations may result in a temporary or indefinite block from the Community. Thanks for understanding.

[pcfreak30]

I just hit this today. This is frankly stupid. and its a 1 file change, a few lines of code, a fix commit.

[humzakhalid94]

I'm also facing this issue, tried everything. From creating a new branch to cherry picking, still doesn't let PR be merged.

[rathpc]

This just happened to me and none of the above suggested solutions work. Can this please get some attention?

[maximeperraultdev]

Same for me today. None of the solutions works

[7patricia]

It's happening for me today and none of the workarounds seem to help.

[rathpc]

It seems to be a bigger issue than this as well, here are the things that I have found not to be working since yesterday:

• In a PR, Update with Rebase is simply not working. It shows a message saying that "This branch cannot be rebased due to too many changes" but that is simply false as it even happens on a PR with a 1 file change that has absolutely no conflict.
  

  • We cannot update with merge commits as this would break many things in our tooling as we forbid them.

• In a PR that has not been added to the queue, even with using admin rights and bypassing the requirement to use the queue, force rebasing and merging shows an error before you try to do the action and after.
  
  

  • This same result also happens directly from the GH CLI or GH API using admin permissions, so it isn't just the UI that is the issue, the api's themselves are rejecting the request for some reason.

• If you do mark your PR ready for review so that it will add to the queue when all PR checks pass, it does in fact add your PR to the queue but nothing else happens. A gh-readonly-queue-* branch is not generated, both workflows that we have set up to trigger for queue entries do not run and they just sit there indefinitely in a "waiting" state.

What has been tried per this discussion:

• I have attempted to close PR's, delete the branch, restore the branch and reopen the PR - no luck
• I have attempted to change the base branch from main to another random branch and then back to main - no luck
• I have attempted to use the mobile GH app to perform the actions - no luck

So this does not seem isolated to just one thing. The only thing that does work is to manually cherry pick commits from these PR branches directly onto main after confirming that all checks do indeed pass once those branches are manually rebased on top of main locally and force pushed as well.

This is not acceptable and we should not have to do this to merge our PRs.

[iniinikoski]

Just wanted to give my 1 cent here: we also had this issue with one of our repos; GitHub's support was able to resolve this for us very quickly. So, if you have a support contract, just ping them as looks like it's a per-repo fix that they need to do there.

[rathpc]

This was very helpful to know and I had already submitted a support ticket but knowing it is a per-repo thing is crucial. It would be really interesting to know what exactly the issue is that needs to be fixed is though. Did you happen to be told that?

[iniinikoski]

This was very helpful to know and I had already submitted a support ticket but knowing it is a per-repo thing is crucial. It would be really interesting to know what exactly the issue is that needs to be fixed is though. Did you happen to be told that?

Their actual words were "we observed an issue with the repository XXX and our engineering team fixed it" - so, it's actually my conclusion then a bit that it'd be a per-repo problem. :)

Nope, they did not shed any light on the actual issue so we can only do guesswork here... Maybe it's a mix of changes (or maybe the root cause can be different at times).