PR management for GitHub repos. merge-bot automates pull request integration by checking a configurable set of conditions before merging: required labels, blocking labels, and optional reviewer approval. Once conditions are met, the PR is merged with the method of your choice and the branch is cleaned up.

It’s designed to replace the manual label-watching and back-and-forth of “is this ready?” — wire it up, set your rules, and let the bot handle the rest.

Why

This came out of a real workflow gap at Microsoft. The team was already using labels to signal when a PR was ready — required labels, blocking labels, reviewer sign-off — but nothing actually pulled the trigger. Someone still had to watch the queue, check the conditions, and click merge. That last mile was manual and annoying.

GitHub Actions were also brand new at the time, which made it a two-for-one: solve the team’s problem and figure out what Actions could actually do. Publishing to the Marketplace was the natural next step — if we needed this, other teams did too.

Setup

Add a workflow file at .github/workflows/merge-bot.yml:

name: Merge Bot
on:
  pull_request:
    types: [labeled, unlabeled, review_requested, review_request_removed]
  pull_request_review:
jobs:
  merge:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: squalrus/merge-bot@v1
      with:
        GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        labels: ready
        blocking_labels: do not merge
        method: squash

Options