create-pr

Create Pull Request

Create pull requests following Sentry's engineering practices.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when:

Requires: GitHub CLI (gh) authenticated and available.

Prerequisites

Before creating a PR, ensure all changes are committed. If there are uncommitted changes, run the sentry-skills:commit skill first to commit them properly.

# Check for uncommitted changes
git status --porcelain

If the output shows any uncommitted changes (modified, added, or untracked files that should be included), invoke the sentry-skills:commit skill before proceeding.

Process

Step 1: Verify Branch State

# Detect the default branch
BASE=$(gh repo view --json defaultBranchRef --jq '.defaultBranchRef.name')
Check current branch and status

git status
git log $BASE..HEAD --oneline

Ensure:

Step 2: Analyze Changes

Review what will be included in the PR:

# See all commits that will be in the PR
git log $BASE..HEAD
See the full diff

git diff $BASE...HEAD

Understand the scope and purpose of all changes before writing the description.

Step 3: Write the PR Description

Use this structure for PR descriptions (ignoring any repository PR templates):

<brief description of what the PR does>
<why these changes are being made - the motivation>
<alternative approaches considered, if any>
<any additional context reviewers need>

Do NOT include:

Do include:

Step 4: Create the PR

gh pr create --draft --title "<type>(<scope>): <description>" --body "$(cat <<'EOF'
<description body here>
EOF
)"

Title format follows commit conventions:

PR Description Examples

Feature PR

Add Slack thread replies for alert notifications
When an alert is updated or resolved, we now post a reply to the original
Slack thread instead of creating a new message. This keeps related
notifications grouped and reduces channel noise.
Previously considered posting edits to the original message, but threading
better preserves the timeline of events and works when the original message
is older than Slack's edit window.
Refs SENTRY-1234

Bug Fix PR

Handle null response in user API endpoint
The user endpoint could return null for soft-deleted accounts, causing
dashboard crashes when accessing user properties. This adds a null check
and returns a proper 404 response.
Found while investigating SENTRY-5678.
Fixes SENTRY-5678

Refactor PR

Extract validation logic to shared module
Moves duplicate validation code from the alerts, issues, and projects
endpoints into a shared validator class. No behavior change.
This prepares for adding new validation rules in SENTRY-9999 without
duplicating logic across endpoints.

Issue References

Reference issues in the PR body:

Guidelines

Editing Existing PRs

If you need to update a PR after creation, use gh api instead of gh pr edit:

# Update PR description
gh api -X PATCH repos/{owner}/{repo}/pulls/PR_NUMBER -f body="$(cat <<'EOF'
Updated description here
EOF
)"
Update PR title

gh api -X PATCH repos/{owner}/{repo}/pulls/PR_NUMBER -f title='new: Title here'
Update both

gh api -X PATCH repos/{owner}/{repo}/pulls/PR_NUMBER \
  -f title='new: Title' \
  -f body='New description'

Note: gh pr edit is currently broken due to GitHub's Projects (classic) deprecation.

References