As a novice programmer still learning the ropes of collaborative coding, I regularly find myself creating unnecessary or redundant pull requests on GitHub. Just the other day while contributing to an open-source project, I accidentally submitted a pull request to the wrong branch. Whoops! I definitely needed to delete that pull request before it led to any confusion or merge conflicts down the line.
Over time, I've picked up a few tips and tricks for properly deleting a pull request when I inevitably need that safety net. Whether you mistakenly target the wrong branch, someone else tackles the same changes in a separate PR, or you realize your code updates are no longer relevant, deleting a PR is handy to keep your repositories clutter-free.
Here's my personal approach as a GitHub beginner.
The first step is recognizing when deleting a PR makes sense. From my experience, some good reasons include:
The clearer I am on why that PR should be deleted, the smoother the process seems to go.
If I've put a decent amount of work into a pull request, I try to communicate with the other contributors and maintainers before removing it. A quick @mention in the PR commenting thread explaining why I think the request should be closed prevents any confusion down the line.
Sometimes my change of heart even leads to constructive conversations on improving the project's onboarding or documentation for new contributors like myself..
Once I decide to remove a PR, GitHub makes it simple to complete the deletion:
And voilà! The pull request disappears from the repository's records, keeping the master branch that much cleaner.
For bonus points, if I was working in a local branch that I no longer need with those PR changes reverted, I'll run git branch -d to delete that branch from my machine too. Out of sight, out of mind!
Deleting a pull request is a natural part of the collaborative coding process. As I gain more experience contributing to open-source, I'm sure I'll continue cleaning up my fair share of unnecessary PRs.
The key for me as a beginner is learning when a pull request deserves deletion, communicating transparently about my decision, and following GitHub's easy PR removal workflow.
Before too long, I'll hopefully stop submitting premature or redundant PRs altogether! But until then, it's great knowing how to tidy up my GitHub contributions when necessary.
Does deleting your own PR fill you with stress or relief? I'd love to hear your personal take as a programmer at any level down in the replies. Maybe we can exchange some tips.
