GitHub pushes stacked pull requests into public preview

Advancing on software development, GitHub has announced the public preview of stacked pull requests.

The public preview was announced July 30.

Stacked pull requests break large changes into a chain of smaller, dependent pull requests. A stacked pull request is an ordered series of pull requests that each represent focused layers of a change,” GitHub said in the announcement. The goal is to make pull requests easier to review, and to avoid splitting work across multiple branches that must be continually rebased.

According to GitHub, teams can:

• Keep large changes moving by reviewing short, narrowly scoped pull requests in parallel.





• Maintain quality across every layer by using focused pull request reviews alongside each branch protections to protect main.





• Merge some, one, or all by landing an entire stack altogether or individual layers one at a time.

Using stacked pull requests requires the gh stack extension fo the GitHub CLI. Developers can install the extension with the following command:

gh extension install github/gh-stack

In what may have been a response to the rising tide of AI-generated code, GitHub announced stacked pull requests in April.