GitHub: Reopening a merged pull request

126
votes
  • I made some changes
  • I submitted a pull request
  • The pull request was accepted and merged.
  • We found a bug
  • The changes were removed again whilst I fixed the bug.

I've now fixed the bug and want to resubmit the pull request with 1 extra commit. Is there any way to reopen the pull request or update it, or do I have to create a new pull request, type out the description etc again? Gitorious has this feature and we've recently moved to GitHub.

6
githubmergepull-request
I was in similar situation today i.e. used "Merge Pull Request" button which by default merge the changes into target branch and close the PR. I later discovered a bug in testing which I wanted the original developer to fix. I wanted a way to reopen this PR so that more commits can be added to this same PR but could not as there is no button for reopening the PR. – SBirthare

6 Answers

132
votes

The answer seems to be: You can't.

Once a pull request is merged and closed, it is locked forever and cannot be reopened. If your pull request is merged, closed, then your changes are pulled out (via force pushing backwards to before the merge), you will need to add commits to the branch and create a new pull request, copying all the details over and probably providing a link to the original pull request to manually save the history.

Might be a nice feature request for future GitHub.

10
votes

I just successfully reopened a pull request by

  1. Commenting on the pull request
  2. Clicking the 'Submit and re-open' button which appeared on the comment form.
4
votes

Just derive a new branch from the existing branch where you have done extra 1 commit. From there submit the pull request.

4
votes

You can use the revert action:

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It will create another pull request undoing all the changes did in the merged PR.

0
votes

You could just revert a reverted PR, this should have all the changes that was reverted from original PR.

0
votes

I managed to reopen it by:

  1. Restoring the base branch
  2. Reopen and Comment