Implementing a merge freeze

There are two main types of merge freeze: a manual freeze and a scheduled freeze.

Manual freeze

To implement a manual freeze all you need to do is click the “Freeze” button inside your protected branch in the Merge Freeze control panel or select "Freeze" from the drop-down menu in the projects list. This will update the Merge Freeze status in GitHub to a FAILED state. Depending on how you’ve set up your protected branch in GitHub this will either block merging completely or be a visual indicator that merging should be avoided.

How do I set up GitHub to block merging completely rather than just show a warning?

Unfreeze 1 pull request

Sometimes you may want to get one pull request merged and deployed while still blocking other pull requests from being merged.

You can achieve this by clicking “Unfreeze 1 pull request” inside the web UI, or from the /mergefreeze Slack command.

A prompt will appear asking you to provide the name or number of the pull request that you would like to unblock. The latter is the ID found in GitHub that sits alongside the title of a pull request. It also appears in the URL of the pull request like so: https://github.com/My-Company/My-App/pull/5.

After clicking a recent PR by name, or inputting a PR by ID, click to Save and Merge Freeze will update the status of that PR so you can merge it into your protected branch.

Unfreezing single pull requests are only available if your project's "freeze method" is "Push a status update to all PRs."