Merge a stack manually
Note
For the best experience, we recommend merging a stack of pull requests through Graphite stack merge.
Merging with stack merge in the Graphite app saves a substantial amount of time. However, if you'd like to manually merge your PRs, merge the PRs in the stack one at a time:
Merge the bottom PR of your stack into your trunk on the Graphite app (or through GitHub).
Run
gt syncfrom any branch of your stack to pulltrunkto local, delete the merged branch, and restack the rest of your stack ontrunk.From any branch in your stack, run
gt submitto force push the restacked branches so the new bottom of your stack can be merged intotrunk.Repeat until you've landed all of the branches in your stack.
Note
We recommend always merging from the bottom of the stack. While there are other techniques, we've found that this is the most intuitive and safest model for our users.
Merging in reverse order from the middle or top of the stack and collapsing all of the PRs into one is the fastest way to merge an entire stack, but there are a number of pitfalls for users—namely around syncing this merged state locally (to continue developing on any upstack PRs) or undoing these changes if a user decides not to merge a PR. This may lead to perilous situations where users have felt like they've lost code or can't re-create their previous state.
While certainly not impossible, it's also harder to re-derive the original stack of PRs when looking at the git history.
GitHub status check
To help prevent accidental mid-stack merges, Graphite creates an optional status check on GitHub for upstack PRs. This status check fails for all upstack PRs, and passes for all base PRs.
Since it's an optional check by default, you can still merge mid-stack if needed.
To configure this status check for your GitHub org:
Open the Graphite web app's settings page
Select the "Mergeability checks" page
Edit the
Mergeability check on GitHubsetting
Teams can make this check required in order to fully prevent merging PRs in a stack out of order:
In GitHub, if you don't have one already, create a branch protection rule targeting
*Enable
Allow forces pushesCaution: when adding a new rule, by default it'll add branch restrictions that didn't previously exist, blocking common workflows on development branches. To avoid that, make sure to also:
In Graphite, edit the
Mergeability status check on GitHubsetting to "Run on all PRs"Make the mergeability check required on GitHub using the branch protection rule
Note: this cannot be enforced via GitHub rulesets due to limitations rulesets functionality: you must enforce this using a branch protection rule.
