Setting Up a Merge Queue

Mergify’s Merge Queue is a powerful feature that helps you streamline and manage your pull request (PR) merging process more efficiently.

The Merge Queue works by ensuring each PR meets all defined conditions before it’s merged. It checks for PR status, branch conditions, approval reviews, and other set criteria, ensuring that your main branch is always stable and free of bugs that might occur due to unreviewed code. Furthermore, by managing PRs queue, Mergify eliminates the need for manual tracking and merging, freeing up your team to focus on what’s essential — building quality software.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of setting up your first Merge Queue, explain how to add PRs to it, and show you how to configure the conditions that the PRs must meet before being merged. Whether you’re new to Mergify or looking to make your process more efficient, this guide will give you the knowledge you need to leverage the power of Merge Queue.

Mergify provides a default merge queue named default for every repository as soon as you set up Mergify. This queue works out-of-the-box and uses your repository’s branch protection settings defined in GitHub.

For instance, if you have branch protection rules that require passing CI checks before merging, the default merge queue respects these rules. It means Mergify will only merge pull requests that pass these checks and are in the default queue.

Understanding this default queue is essential as it forms the basis of how Mergify handles your pull requests, ensuring a streamlined and orderly merge process.

For more details about merge queues and their functions, you can refer to our merge queue introduction.

To have a more refined control over the PRs entering the merge queue and when they get merged, you can set up queue_rules in your Mergify configuration file. These two constructs allow you to define custom conditions that should be met before a PR is added to the queue (queue_conditions) and when it can be merged (merge_conditions).

Here is an example of how you can use queue_rules:

queue_rules:
  - name: default
    queue_conditions:
      - check-success = mycijob
      - "#approved-reviews-by >= 1"

In this example, a PR can enter the default queue when the CI named mycijob has passed, and if the pull request has been approved by at least one contributor. If that’s the not the case, the PR won’t get queued.

The default for Mergify is to allow any PR to be queued.

The merge_conditions defines the condition required to get a PR merged once it has entered the queue. Mergify injects all branch protection settings defined by GitHub, so there’s no need to repeat them. You can however, add more if you want, or only rely on Mergify for setting up those conditions:

queue_rules:
  - name: default
    queue_conditions:
      - check-success = mycijob
      - "#approved-reviews-by >= 1"
    merge_conditions:
      - check-success = mycijob-extra

If a PR stops matching its queue_conditions, it will be removed from the queue. That means there is no need to repeat the queue_conditions in the merge_conditions as they are implicit.

Once you have your merge queue rules set up, you can manually add a PR to the merge queue. To do this, use the queue command. This will add your PR to the specified merge queue, or to the merge queue matching the right queue_conditions.

Remember, the PR will only be merged once the conditions defined in the merge_conditions field are met.

If you prefer, you can ask Mergify to automatically queue pull requests that are ready using workflow automation.

After you’ve added Pull Requests to your merge queue, you will want to monitor its status to understand the progression of your PRs. This can be done directly from the Mergify dashboard. In the “Repository” section, you will see a “Merge Queues” tab. Clicking on it will show you the current state of your merge queue.

Here, you can view all the PRs in the queue and their current statuses. PRs that are waiting for their merge_conditions to be met are marked as pending, while those that have met all their queue_conditions are displayed in the queue and will be merged when they reach the top of the queue.

Remember, the PRs in the queue are ordered based on their addition time. The PR added first will be merged first after all its conditions are met. You can modify the order of the pull request inside a queue using priorities.

Congratulations, you’ve just set up your first Merge Queue with Mergify! You’re now armed with a powerful tool to automate and streamline your PR merging process, reducing the potential for conflicts and ensuring your main branch is always in a consistent, deployable state.

However, setting up a basic merge queue is just the beginning. Mergify’s powerful and flexible configuration system enables you to tailor your merge queues to your specific needs.

For further exploration and inspiration, here are some additional resources and use cases that you might find useful:

• Using priorities to order your pull requests;

• Speeding up your merge queue with parallel checks;

• Saving CI time with batches;

• Delaying checks at merge time;

• Splitting repositories into partitions (monorepo support).

Remember, the possibilities with merge queues are limited only by your imagination. Happy merging!