GitHub’s merge queue aims to end congestion on a team’s most active branches. According to the company, by enabling merge queue, the need to hurry and merge pull requests before others do is no longer a concern.
This feature is now generally available and is accessible to any team that is part of a managed organization with public repositories and GitHub Enterprise Cloud users. They can activate this feature on their respective repositories and start streamlining their team’s pull requests immediately.
The merge queue is specifically designed for high-performance teams in which multiple users regularly commit to a single branch. According to GitHub, before the introduction of the merge queue, engineers had to try merging directly onto an already active branch, potentially leading to code conflicts and a repetitive cycle of rework.
GitHub’s merge queue eliminates that possibility by creating a temporary branch that includes the latest changes from the base branch, the changes from other pull requests already in the queue, and the changes from your pull request.
Once this is done, continuous integration begins, with the understanding that all required status checks must pass before the branch, representing the associated pull requests, is merged. In essence, the merge queue acts as the ultimate branch traffic controller, GitHub explained.
