Backport

The backport action enables you to automatically create a backport of a merged pull request. When the conditions you specify are met, Mergify will create a new pull request to merge the changes into the specified base branch.

The backport action is extremely useful for maintaining older versions of your project. It helps automate the process of applying bug fixes or other changes from the main branch to other branches.

Note that in case of a conflict during the backport, Mergify will create a pull request with the conflict; you will have to resolve it manually. You can change this behaviour using the ignore_conflicts option.

The backport action takes a list of branches to which the changes from the merged pull request will be backported. The branch names should be specified as strings.

|
  {{ body }}
This is an automatic backport of pull request #{{number}} done by [Mergify](https://mergify.com).

null

true

conflicts

merge

- check

"{{ title }} (backport #{{ number }})"

As the title and body are templates, you can leverage any pull request attributes to use as content, e.g., {{author}}.

Note that the commits attribute here will be the list of cherry picked commits.

On top of that, you can also use the following additional variables:

• {{ destination_branch }}: the name of the destination branch.

• {{ cherry_pick_error }}: the cherry pick error message if any (only available in body).

Below is an example of how to use the backport action:

pull_request_rules:
  - name: backport patches to the release branch and assign to original author
    conditions:
      - label = backport
    actions:
      backport:
        branches:
          - "release-1.0"
          - "release-1.1"
        assignees:
          - "{{ author }}"

You can also combine the backport action with other actions like merge. This can be useful in scenarios where you want to automatically backport and merge pull requests that fulfill certain conditions.

Here’s an example:

pull_request_rules:
  - name: backport patches to the release branch
    conditions:
      - label = backport
    actions:
      backport:
        branches:
          - "release-1.0"
          - "release-1.1"

  - name: automatically merge backport if they pass tests
    conditions:
      - author = mergify[bot]
      - base ~= ^mergify/bp/
      - head ~= ^release-1.
      - check-success = continuous-integration
    actions:
      merge:
        method: merge

In this configuration, a pull request is backported when it has the label backport. Then, when the backport is created and passes the check named continuous-integration, it will be automatically merged.

If you are used to the -x option of git cherry-pick that includes which commits has been cherry-picked, you can implement the same thing with Mergify:

pull_request_rules:
  - name: backport patches to the stable branch
    conditions:
      - label = backport
    actions:
      backport:
        body: |
          {{ body }}

          {% for c in commits %}
          (cherry picked from commit {{ c.sha }})
          {% endfor %}
        branches:
          - stable