Repository rules are now generally available on GitHub.com.

Repository rules allow you to easily govern protections for branches and tags on your repositories. Repository collaborators also gain access to see what rules are in place via the Web, git client, and the GitHub CLI.

For GitHub Enterprise Cloud customer, you gain the ability to enforce branch and tag protections across repositories in your organization. As well as insights on rule enforcement, evaluation mode to test rules before enforcing them and governance around commit messages.

Check out the blog post to learn more about repository rules. And if you have feedback, please share and let us know in our feedback discussion.

We are introducing a number of enhancements, bug fixes and a breaking API change to repository rules.

1. UI Updates
* Added a repository picker to target select repositories for organization rulesets.
* Improvements to rule violations in the WebUI and git client.

2. Ruleset Bypass updates

• Bypass can be limited to pull request exemptions only.
• Single UI for bypass, collapsing bypass mode, and bypass list into one experience.
• Support for using repository roles as a bypass type
• Integrations (bots/apps) are now bypassable at the org.
  

3. API Enhancements

• Add fields for created and updated date
• Permission changes so all repo contributors can query the API for relevant rules enforced on branches.

4. Bug fixes

• Linear merge history could block bypass
• Branches could not always be created when using commit metadata rules
• Tag protections were failing for apps

5. API Changes

• GraphQL changes will be delayed by 24-72 hours.
• Breaking Change Remove bypass_mode from the Ruleset object and input
• Breaking Change Add bypass_mode as a required field for bypass actors to indicate if an actor can “always” bypass a ruleset or can only bypass for a “pull_request”
• Breaking Change for GraphQL Change bypass_actor_ids to a new bypass_actors object on the create and update mutations that can accept repository roles and organization admins
• Add repository_role_database_id, repository_role_name, and organization_admin fields to RepositoryRulesetBypassActor to indicate when the bypass actor is a role or org admin bypass
• “get rules for a branch” REST API endpoint now returns ruleset source info for each rule.
• “get a repo ruleset” REST API endpoint now has a current_user_can_bypass field that indicates whether the user making the request can bypass the ruleset.
• source field for rulesets returned via the REST API will now properly contain the repo in owner/name syntax when the ruleset is configured on a repository, rather than just the repository’s name.

We want to hear from you on how we can improve repository rules! Join the conversation in the repository rules public beta discussion.

Announcing important changes to what it means for a pull request to be 'approved'.

If you use pull requests with protected branches, there are some important security improvements rolling out now that may impact your workflow:

• Merge commits created locally and pushed to a protected branch will be rejected if the contents differ from the system-created merge.
• The branch protection for dismissing stale reviews now dismisses approvals whenever a merge base changes after a review.
• A pull request approval now only counts towards the pull request it was submitted against.

Note: You may see some older approvals dismissed as we rollout these changes.

Read on to learn more about the specific changes:

User-created merges must have the same contents as the system-created merge.

Previously, it was possible for users to make unreviewed changes to a protected branch, by creating the merge commit locally and pushing it to the server. The merge would be accepted, so long as the parents commits were set correctly.

Going forward, manually creating the merge commit for a pull request and pushing it directly to a protected branch will only succeed if the contents of the merge exactly match the system-generated merge for the pull request. This new check will be enforced on branches where the branch protections mentioned earlier are enabled.

Pull request approvals will become stale if the merge base changes
A pull request approval will be marked as stale when the merge base changes after a review is submitted.

The merge base of a pull request is the closest common ancestor of both the target and source branches for that pull request. It is often (but not always) the commit where a user has branched off the mainline development and started working on a topic branch:

When "dismiss stale approvals" is enabled, the review will be dismissed and needs a re-approval. If branch protection rules specify that every push needs to be reviewed by a second contributor, a change in the merge base will require fresh approvals.

Merge bases changing under a pull request will preserve approvals in most situations where no new changes are introduced.

Pull requests no longer combine approvals.
Previously it was possible for a branch protected by "required pull request review" to be merged without an approved PR. This was possible because approvals were gathered across multiple independent pull requests if the feature branches pointed to the same commit as well as targeting the same branch.

We appreciate your feedback in GitHub's public feedback discussions.