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How to Review a Pull Request

• Open the Pull Request on GitHub

• Click the “Add your review” button

  

• On the code page which appears, look through the changes, checking for everything which is important for your project, starting with overall intent and structure, then correctness, whether the code is tested, documentation, consistency with the rest of the codebase, style, etc.

• Add comments wherever you think they are needed or useful.

  • Hover over the line number you want to comment on, then click the “+” button which appears to start a comment.

    

  • Add a description or comment.

  • It is sometimes easier for the PR’s author if you include concrete suggestions:

    

  • Once your comment is done, click the “start a review” button.

    

• Continue adding comments as required, adding them to the review.

  

• Once you’re done, click on “Finish your review”

  • Add a summary comment.

  • Select whether you want to:

    • make a comment (not explicitly approving the PR),
    • approve the PR (and allow it to be merged) or
    • request changes.

  • Click “Submit your review”

    

🎉 You’re done! 🎉

<aside> 💡 Suggesting bigger changes: If you want to make concrete suggestions which affect several lines or several files, you can create a new PR to hold them. Make sure you:

• Make the “base” branch the same as the original PR.
• Make the author of the PR a reviewer.
• Add a comment in the original PR to say that you’ve made a newer PR.

In this case, the PR-merge etiquette is that the author of the original PR should merge the changes if they approve of them, just like they merge (or don’t ignore) suggestions from comments.

</aside>

<aside> ⚠️ Important considerations around comments

Please follow the usual rules of giving feedback:

• Comment on the content, not the person who created it.
• Use the personal pronoun in your feedback: “I think that…” or “I would change how this works in the following way: …” or “I think we understand this concept differently. I see it this way: …”
• The PR and any comments or reviews on it may be available on the web for ever. Even if a repository is “Private” today, it may be made “Public” in the future, along with all of the PRs and the review comments. </aside>