Pull Requests as Branches

~169 words. ~0 minutes.

Consider these questions:

• Do you find it annoying to use the web interface to merge pull requests? Do you copy paste the merge instructions from your forge's web interface?

• Perhaps you like to checkout the PR branch first? Do you manually add their repository to your config? Perhaps, you use the following command

  git fetch -u <pull requester’s git repo url> <their branch name>:<branch name for your repo>
  git switch <branch-name-for-your-repo>
  

I used to do these things too.

Then I discovered that, at least on Forgejo, you can just have the PRs show up as branches, just add the following configuration to your .git/config file.

[remote "origin-pr"]
        url = <your git repository’s url>
        fetch = +refs/pull/*/head:refs/remotes/pr-*

Then run,

git fetch origin-pr

Now you can check out any PR with

git checkout pr-<number>