Any way to get a timestamp of when a PR was ready for merge?

[bikram-agarwal]

In my team's GitHub repo, we require a few status checks to pass before a pull request is allowed to be merged. (Two are in-house custom built jenkins jobs, two are 3rd party CI jobs from Gearset and Codescan.)

Earlier, the merge was a manual process. Developers used to create the PR, go do their other tasks, return to the PR page after some time (10min, 30 min, or hours later) so that all required status checks have passed and then manually click the "merge pull request" button.

We've now enabled the "Allow Auto-merge" option in the repo. So now developers don't have to manually monitor their PR. They can click the "Enable auto-merge" button immediately after creating the PR. When all the status checks pass, it automatically merges the PR.

But we need to show the management how much time it is saving. And to show that, I need to calculate the how much time the PRs were sitting idle before we enabled the "auto merge" feature; i.e. time difference between when the PR was ready for merge (i.e. passed all required status checks) and when the PR was actually manually merged.

I know "time of merge" can be obtained via this command -
gh pr view $pr --json mergedAt --jq .mergedAt

But there's no similar command to find when a PR was ready for merge. "mergeable" option only return whether currently open PR is mergable or not. (and always returns "unknown" for PRs that are already merged.) Kinda same for "mergeStateStatus".

Is it possible to calculate exact time when a PR was ready for merge? If not possible with current gh, can I request this as a new feature in future versions?

[samcoe]

@bikram-agarwal As far as I am aware the platform does not expose/calculate that information in the API so it is unlikely we would be able to address this request here and would need platform changes to support a feature like that. Having said that, would retrieving the PR checks give you an accurate estimate of when the checks passed and the PR was mergable?

[bikram-agarwal]

would retrieving the PR checks give you an accurate estimate of when the checks passed and the PR was mergable?

Did you mean using the "statusCheckRollup" option? I did try that too, but the output of that shows "startedAt" timestamp, not finishedAt. For example -

gh pr view 21552 --json statusCheckRollup --jq .statusCheckRollup
[
  {
    "__typename": "StatusContext",
    "context": "PR Approval Check",
    "startedAt": "2023-07-04T01:06:59Z",
    "state": "SUCCESS",
    "targetUrl": "https://REDACTED"
  },
  {
    "__typename": "StatusContext",
    "context": "PR Jira Check",
    "startedAt": "2023-07-04T01:07:18Z",
    "state": "SUCCESS",
    "targetUrl": "https://REDACTED"
  },
  {
    "__typename": "StatusContext",
    "context": "codescan/sfdc-stg",
    "startedAt": "2023-07-04T01:08:08Z",
    "state": "SUCCESS",
    "targetUrl": "https://app.codescan.io/dashboard?REDACTED"
  },
  {
    "__typename": "StatusContext",
    "context": "Gearset 2. staging to Staging Deploy",
    "startedAt": "2023-07-04T01:12:11Z",
    "state": "SUCCESS",
    "targetUrl": "https://app.gearset.com/continuous-integration-runs?jobId=REDACTED"
  }
]

The "PR Approval Check" and "PR Jira Check" are custom built jenkins jobs and typically take ~2 mins to complete. So, startedAt timestamp is good enough for those. But the other two - "codescan/sfdc-stg", "Gearset 2. staging to Staging Deploy" are 3rd party jobs which take anywhere from 5 mins to 30+ mins depending on amount of code change and other factors. So, startedAt timestamp isn't useable for those.

would need platform changes to support a feature like that.

Is there some community forum or some other place where I can request that?

[samcoe]

@bikram-agarwal Ah I see, my previous suggestion will not work for your use case as the status checks your team is using are not run on GitHub Actions. For those types of checks an additional field of "completedAt" is also returned which you could have used. But from the docs I don't see any fields there that you can use to figure out the run/completion time. I would suggest raising this issue in the community discussions located here.

[bikram-agarwal]

GitHub Actions is disabled in our org. So all our status checks and CIs are either custom built or run via webhook.
Thanks for looking at this thread and giving me pointers.