Workflow Automation

Workflow Automation handles the routine work on your pull requests. You write rules in your Mergify configuration file, and Mergify carries them out: labeling, commenting, assigning, rebasing, merging, and more. Your team spends less time on pull request housekeeping.

Every rule lives under pull_request_rules and pairs a set of conditions with the actions to run when a pull request matches them:

pull_request_rules:
  - name: add "WIP" label when the title contains "WIP"
    conditions:
      - title ~= WIP
    actions:
      label:
        toggle:
          - WIP

Here, any pull request whose title contains WIP gets the WIP label. Once the title no longer matches, Mergify removes it.

Mergify evaluates the state of a pull request rather than individual events. It checks the current status of a pull request and acts based on the conditions you defined. This behavior is known as “edge triggering”: once an action has run, Mergify does not run it again while the rule keeps matching. It runs a second time only after the pull request stops matching the rule and then matches again.

Not every action works that way. assign, dismiss_reviews, edit, label, post_check, rebase, request_reviews, review, squash, and update run on every evaluation instead, which is how they hold a pull request in the state a rule describes. The rule above relies on that: if someone removes the WIP label while the title still matches, Mergify puts it back.