Merge Branches with GitHub Actions

A GitHub Action to keep important branches up to date! It's especially useful if you have a staging and a hotfix branch that both push to main and need to be up to date with the latest changes to main at all times.

Usage

Here's a quick example workflow that triggers on every push on main that updates a single branch called develop:

name: Merge branches

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  merge-branches:
    name: Merge main into develop
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Test Local Action
        uses: DerTimonius/merge-branches@v1
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
          branches: develop
          force: true

You can also pass in multiple branches in an array (you have to use brackets and wrap them in quotes for this work properly):

name: Merge branches

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  merge-branches:
    name: Merge main into develop
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Test Local Action
        uses: DerTimonius/merge-git-branches@v1
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
          branches: '[develop, hotfix]'
          force: true

GitHub Personal Access Token

A Personal Access Token (PAT) is necessary for this action to run. You can learn about PATs here.

Tag check

When the option checkTags is set to true, this aciton will check if the tag is the HEAD of a protected branch. If it's not the head or if it's not the head of the protected branch, the action fails.

Options

Name	Type	Description
token	required	GitHub Personal Access Token needed for the commit.
branches	required	The branches that should be updated. For example develop or "[develop, hotfix]"
force	default: false	Defines if the commit should be force-pushed or not.
checkTags	default: false	Enable tag checks by setting checkTags to true if you want to include tag validation in the GitHub Action workflow.