Ryan Turek

Generic GitHub Pull Request Template

by · April 26, 2018

It’s all too easy to make a Pull Request on GitHub that has as little information as possible (if any description at all), but your coworkers and maybe even future-you will hate you for it if they have to come back and figure out what you did by reading the entirety of your 2000 line changes when you could have just summed it up in a few lines in your PR’s description.

I recommend requiring a minimum set of information to be provided by the requester for each PR before it’s even looked at.

Here is my repo with a generic PR template that you can copy:
https://github.com/RTurek/PullRequestTemplate

Here is a guide to setting up a pull request template for your GitHub repository:
https://help.github.com/articles/creating-a-pull-request-template-for-your-repository/

Basically you just need to make a file with some markdown in the right place, and GitHub knows where to find it when creating a PR. Once this file is on your repo’s default branch, all future PR’s will have this markdown in their description.

Preview:

Ryan-Turek-GitHub-Generic-Pull-Request-Template

Raw Markdown:

## Related JIRA Issues:
[DEV-###](https://yourdomain.atlassian.net/browse/DEV-###)
[DEV-###](https://yourdomain.atlassian.net/browse/DEV-###)
[DEV-###](https://yourdomain.atlassian.net/browse/DEV-###)

## Description Of Major Changes:
* Changed This
* Updated That
* Deleted This

## Steps To Test:
1. Log in
2. Do a thing
3. Do another thing

## TODO:
- [ ] Change this
- [ ] Update that
- [ ] Remove this

---
**[Markdown](https://guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown/)**

Encourage your developers to fill out whatever info you think is necessary!

I’ll be keeping this generic template up to date as I think of more useful things to add to it. Feel free to leave a comment below with any suggestions to improve the template. Thanks!

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