What Is PR Gating?

Definition

Pull-request gating prevents a change from merging until required conditions, such as a successful CI workflow, are met.

Why it matters

A gate helps only when it represents current results for the proposed change and the team can act on a failure. A comment is useful context, but it does not itself enforce repository policy.

How teams handle it today

Teams choose reliable blocking tests and require their workflow through branch protection. Nonblocking tests can remain visible while the team evaluates their usefulness.

How Zerocheck approaches it

Zerocheck’s CLI exits non-zero for a blocking failure. A YAML test can set blocks_merge to false to keep a failure visible without blocking. GitHub Actions reporting updates one PR comment; configure GitHub branch protection to require the workflow.

Related terms