Finding Unapproved, Merged PRs

We had a user looking for a way to track merged GitHub pull requests that were unapproved (when merged into a main branch). This is typically done with an "Admin Override" when merging a PR, or from loose branch protection rules allowing for unapproved merges into a branch.

Allowing repo administrators to merge without a review can be a useful shortcut for "emergency" hotfixes that avoid a potentially time-consuming code review cycle. This of course depends on the habits and culture of your engineering organization.

Too many unapproved merges, however, is probably a sign of something wrong (again, depending on the organization and codebase). For instance, a high volume of "emergency fixes" shipping without any review, or developers simply short-circuiting the review cycle to get code merged/deployed quickly.

Surfacing Unapproved, Merged PRs

The following MergeStat query will list all unapproved pull requests merged into the main branch.

SELECT
    number,
    title,
    date(created_at) AS created_at,
    date(merged_at) AS merged_at, 
    author_login,
    review_decision,
    merged
FROM github_prs('mergestat', 'mergestat') -- set to your own repo
WHERE
    merged = true
    AND review_decision <> 'APPROVED'
    AND base_ref_name = 'main' -- set to your own branch
ORDER BY created_at DESC

This will yield a table that looks something like (in our web app):

If you'd like to know which GitHub users most frequently merge without an approval, you can run the following:

SELECT
    count(*), merged_by
FROM github_prs('mergestat', 'mergestat')
WHERE
    merged = true
    AND review_decision <> 'APPROVED'
    AND base_ref_name = 'main'
GROUP BY merged_by
ORDER BY count(*) DESC

which will display an ordered list of the most common "unapproved mergers" in a codebase.

Additional Ideas

1. Filter by created_at or merged_at if you only care about recently merged PRs
2. Query for unapproved (and merged) PRs across an entire GitHub org (rather than a single repo)
3. Create a Slack/Discord bot that alerts when an unnapproved PR is merged, or shares a monthly report
4. Track in a dashboard (a line chart) to record instances over time

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