gh-rr

README

gh-rr

GitHub CLI extension to request reviews from defined groups of reviewers.

Installation

gh extension install g-rath/gh-rr

Usage

Create a gh-rr.yml file in your home directory for configuring groups of reviewers:

# this is a map of repositories to groups of GitHub usernames
repositories:
  # these are "global" groups, which can be enabled with -g|--global
  '*':
    bob: [octopus]
    security:
      - octopus
  g-rath/my-awesome-app:
    # this is the implicit default group that will be used for this repository
    - g-rath
    - octocat
  g-rath/my-awesome-api:
    # this is the default group that will be used for this repository
    default:
      - g-rath
    # this is an alternative group for this repository, which can be selected with -f|--from
    infra:
      - octodog
      - octopus

Then start requesting reviewers on your pull requests:

gh rr

As a thin wrapper around gh pr edit, the repository and pull request are inferred automatically based on the current directory and checked out branch when called without any flags or arguments.

Like with gh pr edit, you can pass either a pull request number, url, or branch as the first argument, and can use the -R|--repo flag to specify the repository the pull request you're targeting belongs to:

# targeting a specific pull request in the current repository
gh rr 123

# targeting the pull request associated with a specific branch in another repository
gh --repo octocat/hello-world my-feature

You can also use the -f|--from flag to target alternative reviewer groups:

gh rr --from infra

This can be combined with the -g|--global to target "global" groups which are defined under the * repository:

# makes it easy to add a specific person
gh rr -gf bob

# or target a group of common people
gh rr -gf security

Why not use CODEOWNERS or GitHub teams?

Both of these can be used to achieve a similar result as this extension, but they're not entirely equivalent: team-focused reviews generally dismiss the team review when a single member of that team submits their review, and automatic review assignment has a limit of up to 7 people (plus, it skips people who set their status to "busy" - while well intended, it assumes everyone diligently updates their status).

While you can use CODEOWNERS to work around this by specifying users instead of teams, that means you then need to do a commit to update the file (which is particularly annoying when you're using branches for deployments), and it only applies at the file level rather than the change level (e.g. you might make an update to a section of your readme that relates to infrastructure, so should be reviewed by your platforms team)