How to close a GitHub pull request with a commit message?

Question

My team uses pull requests internally for code-reviewing the application we maintain, but when it's time to merge a commit, we just push directly to master. We're all repo collabs anyway, and by not using the pull request to merge code, we avoid polluting our commit history with merge commits. Since the app is internal to our team, no one else is affected.

What I want to know is, can I amend my commit message with something like "closes PR #30" and have github automatically close the pull request for me?

I know you can use commit messages to close issues, so I'm hoping there is something similar for pull requests. I did a quick search online and of SO, and didn't see anything.

Answer 1

You probably want to look at this GitHub help page. It says:

You can use any of the following keywords to close an issue via commit message:

• close
• closes
• closed
• fix
• fixes
• fixed
• resolve
• resolves
• resolved

So "Fixes #123" or "Resolved #456" will work. All pull requests are mapped as issues, so this will works for pull requests too.

Note: you'll see a message about unmerged commits because you amended the pull request. So looking at the pull request, it won't be immediately obvious that the PR was incorporated (versus just plain closed) unless you put something meaningful in the first line of the commit message so you can see the message in the pull request.