gh PR Editor Action

This GitHub Action is useful for teams who want to programmatically update and manage existing Pull Requests directly within their CI/CD workflows, leveraging the official GitHub CLI for robust operations.

---

✨ Features

• Full gh pr edit Support: Leverages the official GitHub CLI for robust editing, supporting flags like --title, --base, --add-label, and more.
• Flexible Identification: Edit a PR using its number, URL, or the associated branch name.
• Simple Integration: One-step usage as a Composite Action in any workflow.
• Powered by GitHub CLI: Uses the official GitHub CLI for secure Pull Request management.
• Organization-wide: Can be used across any repository.

🛠️ Usage

1. Prerequisites

• This action expects the GitHub CLI (gh) to be available (it is pre-installed on all GitHub-hosted runners, e.g., ubuntu-latest).
• The environment variable GH_TOKEN must be set to a valid GitHub token with the required write permissions for Pull Requests.

2. Example Workflow Integration

name: Test gh PR Editor Action

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      pr_url:
        description: 'URL or Identifier of the PR to edit'
        required: true

jobs:
  test-edit-pr:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Edit Pull Request
        uses: ws2git/gh-pr-editor-action@v1
        env:
          GH_TOKEN: ${{ github.token }}
        with:
          pr_identifier: ${{ github.event.inputs.pr_url }}
          edit_options: '--title "Test" --body "testing"'

📥 Inputs

Name	Required	Description
pr_identifier	Yes	The target Pull Request identifier (number, URL, or branch name).
edit_options	No	A single string containing all the desired gh pr edit flags and their values (e.g., --title "New Title" --add-label "ready").

⚙️ How It Works

Internally, this action is a Composite Action that executes a shell command. It constructs the final gh pr edit command by combining the pr_identifier input with the edit_options input, and explicitly sets the repository context.

Script logic (Executed in action.yml):

gh pr edit "$PR_IDENTIFIER" --repo "$GITHUB_REPOSITORY" $EDIT_OPTIONS

If the required pr_identifier parameter is missing, the action will fail immediately due to the required: true setting in the action.yml. If the GH_TOKEN is missing or lacks sufficient permissions, the gh command will exit with an error.

🛡️ Security and Authentication

This Action uses the GitHub CLI (gh) to perform the editing operation, and gh requires the authentication token to be provided through the environment variable GH_TOKEN.

Recommended: For operations within the current repository, use the default token ${{ github.token }}. This token has restricted, temporary permissions (based on the workflow's permissions block), which minimizes security risk.

env:
  GH_TOKEN: ${{ github.token }}

Crucial Permission Scopes: To edit a Pull Request, you must grant the necessary write permissions in your workflow:

permissions:
  pull-requests: write # Required for editing PR details (title, body, labels, etc.)

Advanced Operations/External Repositories: If you need elevated permissions (e.g., editing repository Projects) or access to external repositories, pass a PAT (Personal Access Token) stored as a Secret:

env:
  GH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.MY_PAT_SECRET }}

Never expose the PAT in plain text.

---

🔗 Related Documentation

• GitHub Actions Contexts
• GitHub CLI gh pr edit Command

❓ Support

If you find a bug or have a question, open an issue.