Updates to protected branches
Automatically enforce protected branch settings across multiple branches in your repository.

Protected branches make sure the right reviews happen, support passing CI, and prevent force pushes. With our latest update, you can automatically enforce protected branch settings across multiple branches in your repository.
If you’re a repository owner or have admin permissions in a repository, you can now customize branch protections and enforce certain workflows, such as requiring more than one pull request review or requiring certain status checks to pass before allowing a pull request to merge.
Branch protection rules
Branch protection rules build on our existing branch protection functionality. Instead of setting up individual protections for multiple branches, you can share the same set of protections across different branches matching the same naming pattern.
Branch protection rule patterns are based on fnmatch syntax. You could use releases/v?.?
to automatically protect branches like releases/v1.0
, releases/v2.0
, and releases/v2.1
. And [1-9]-[0-9]-stable
could automatically protect branches like 1-0-stable
, 2-0-stable
, and 2-1-stable
.
View more fnmatch documentation or learn more about configuring protected branches.
Written by
Related posts

From MCP to multi-agents: The top 10 new open source AI projects on GitHub right now and why they matter
Get insights on the latest trends from GitHub experts while catching up on these exciting new projects.

Racing into 2025 with new GitHub Innovation Graph data
Discover the latest trends and insights on public software development activity on GitHub with the quarterly release of data for the Innovation Graph, updated through December 2024.

GitHub Availability Report: March 2025
In March, we experienced one incident that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.