Basic Pull Requests

Last updated on 2025-07-15 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 15 minutes

Overview

Questions

  • How do you open a PR?
  • How do you interact with a PR?
  • How do you merge a PR?

Objectives

  • Become familiar with basic actions on GitHub Pull Requests.

Open a PR

A PR cannot be opened without some changes to be incorporated. For this example, we will use the branch and merge workflow; however, another common method is the fork, branch, and merge method.

Multiple Paths Available

We will do the rest of this lesson through the GUI; however, all of these steps can be done via command line and your preferred text editor. Do whatever feels right for you!

Make a Change

First we will make a change to a file in our repository. We click on the preferred file in the repository and hit the “Edit” pencil in the top-right corner.

On a README file, the File edit button in the top-right is highlighted

Once the file is edited to our satisfaction, we click “Commit changes…”, which pops up a dialog box asking us to fill in the commit message.

Commit changes pop-up dialog with the sections Commit message, Extended commit message, and the radio option for "Commit directly to `main`" or "Create a new branch" circled

Rather than committing directly to the main branch, we will instead make a new branch with the changes.

Commit changes pop-up dialog, zoomed in on the "Create a new branch" radio button when clicked, which defaults a branch name that can be changed

GitHub will autopopulate a branch name for us. We can choose to keep it or change it.

Make a PR

Once we click “Commit changes,” the page will load the “Open a pull request” page with our commit message as the title.

Open a pull request page loaded - shows the commit message from the previous step as the Title, empty "Write" section

A new PR has several parts:

  • Title: This will display on the main “Pull request” page.
  • Write: This is an open area for the details of the PR. GitHub support Markdown formatting.
  • Preview: This will preview the Markdown-rendered version of the details.

To open the issue, click the “Create pull request” button.

Newly opened PR with proposed changes - main page shows the Title, description, list of commits, and merge options

Open a New PR

Navigate to your practice repository.

  • Make a change to your README.md file
  • Commit the changes to a new branch
  • Put a basic title and details
  • Create the PR

Interact with a PR

There are many interactions available on an open PR.

The most basic interaction is adding a comment. This is how you can interact with the PR author, the assignee, and others who have commented on or subscribed to the PR.

Simply click in the comment box at the bottom of the PR, type whatever you’d like, and click “Comment.”

Comment box on a Pull Request - Write section includes a statement, "I am writing a comment on this PR"

Another useful feature for GitHub is linking Issues and PRs. This is actually very simple. In the PR’s description or in a comment, mention the relevant Issue using # and the Issue number.

An image using the pound symbol (#) to pop-up options for linking other Issues or Pull Requests

This will create a link to the Issue.

An image showing the pop-up to a linked issue. The pop-up shows a small preview of the linked issue that includes the title and some portion of the description.

You can also edit the information in the right-hand column.

Information block on the right-hand side that includes reviewers, assignees, labels, projects

We will cover the following options:

Options Purpose
Reviewers Assign reviewer(s) to look over your proposed changes.
Assignees Add assignee(s) who are responsible for incorporating proposed changes.
Labels Assign label(s) to categorize the PR.

Assignment Time

Navigate to your PR from the previous exercise.

  • Add yourself as the Assignee
  • Mention one of your open Issues

Merge a PR

We are done with these changes. We have completed the work on it, had our discussion, and now we are ready to merge the changes.

Wait, what about review?

Nobody reviewed our changes, so do we really want to merge? In a real-case scenario, no! We will cover more about reviewing later, though, so we are going to skip it for now.

Merging a PR is quite simple - just click the “Merge pull request” button.

The merge options on the example PR that shows that the branch has no conflicts and the "Merge pull request" button highlighted

The dropdown on the “Merge pull request” shows several options:

Merge PR dropdown with three options - Create a merge commit, Squash and merge, Rebase and merge

We will not cover all of these options here, but read more about them in GitHub’s official documentation.

When you click the “Merge pull request” button, a new dialog box appears, prompting for the commit message. Once you have made the preferred edits, click “Confirm merge.”

Confirm merge dialog box - shows the merge commit message, an extended message, and a button to confirm the merge

The changes have been incorporated back into the main branch.

Time to Merge

Navigate to your PR from the previous exercises.

  • Click “Merge pull request”
  • Modify the merge message
  • Merge!

You now know the basic actions you can take on a GitHub Pull Request!

Key Points

  • New PRs can be opened in a repository from a branch or a fork.
  • Text on PRs use Markdown styling for formatting.
  • A user can interact with PRs in multiple ways: commenting, assigning reviewers, linking to other issues and pull requests, and more.