Mergify Backport Command

The backport command is especially useful for projects that maintain multiple branches simultaneously. It automates the process of creating a new pull request to apply changes from a merged pull request onto another branch, whether you’re maintaining different versions of your software or need to ensure that bug fixes are propagated to all active branches.

Once the backport is initiated, Mergify will provide feedback directly in the comments. If the backport is successful, you’ll receive a link to the newly created pull request. If there are issues, Mergify will provide a brief description of the problem.

If Mergify encounters merge conflicts during the backport process, it will create a pull request with the conflicts. You’ll need to manually resolve these conflicts within GitHub.

The backport command is especially handy for:

• Version Maintenance: Quickly propagate bug fixes to older, maintained versions of your software.

• Feature Parity: Ensure that features developed on a mainline branch are also available on other active branches.

@Mergifyio backport <target-branch> [<another-target-branch>] […]

• <target-branch>: The name of the branch to which the changes should be backported.

Mergify cannot backport a pull request that contains a merge commit, such as when you merge a teammate’s branch into yours. Merges of the base branch into your pull request (for example, Merge branch 'main') are an exception and don’t block the backport.

To avoid this, squash-merge or rebase your pull request before merging so its history stays linear.

Suppose you have a pull request that was merged into main, but you also want to apply these changes to a branch named v2.0-stable. You would use the command as follows:

@Mergifyio backport v2.0-stable

Upon executing this command, Mergify will attempt to automatically create a new pull request with the changes onto the v2.0-stable branch as soon as the original pull request is merged.