A common point of confusion is to try and use an existing branch containing changes to raise in a PR as the branch
input. This will not work because the action is primarily designed to be used in workflows where the PR branch does not exist yet. The action creates and manages the PR branch itself.
If you have an existing branch that you just want to create a PR for, then I recommend using the official GitHub CLI in a workflow step.
Alternatively, if you are trying to keep a branch up to date with another branch, then you can follow this example.
This behaviour is fundamental to how the action works and is a conscious design decision. The "rule" that I based this design on is that when a workflow executes the action to create or update a PR, the result of those two possible actions should never be different. The easiest way to maintain that consistency is to rebase the PR branch and force push it.
If you want to avoid this behaviour there are some things that might work depending on your use case:
- Check if the pull request branch exists in a separate step before the action runs and act accordingly.
- Use the alternative strategy of always creating a new PR that won't be updated by the action.
- Create your own commits each time the action is created/updated.
Presently, there is no plan to add this feature to the action. The reason is that I'm trying very hard to keep the interface for this action to a minimum to prevent it becoming bloated and complicated.
Git hooks must be installed after a repository is checked out in order for them to work. So the straightforward solution is to just not install them during the workflow where this action is used.
- If hooks are automatically enabled by a framework, use an option provided by the framework to disable them. For example, for Husky users, they can be disabled with the
--ignore-scripts
flag, or by setting theHUSKY
environment variable when the action runs.uses: peter-evans/create-pull-request@v6 env: HUSKY: '0'
- If hooks are installed in a script, then add a condition checking if the
CI
environment variable exists.#!/bin/sh [ -n "$CI" ] && exit 0
- If preventing the hooks installing is problematic, just delete them in a workflow step before the action runs.
- run: rm .git/hooks -rf