Converting a github issue into a pull request

Recently someone submitted an issue for one of my open source github repositories (https://github.com/scsmith/language_list). Language list imports a pretty huge list of lanauges as it loads and this was taking a bit of time. There was quite a bit of discussion on the issue, with a fair few branches. Eventaully we were happy with the changes in one of the branches and wanted to bring them into master.

There were two options here, the first is to create a new pull request and just reference the existing issue (you can do this by typing # and using the autocomplete). However I also managed to find this stackoverflow question and answer giving a more preferable option. You can convert an existing issue into a pull request itself. You need to use the github api though but this is pretty easy using curl:

curl --user "your_username:your_password" --request POST --data '{"issue": "4", "head": "username:reponame", "base": "master"}' https://api.github.com/repos/username/reponame/pulls

In this head is the repo you want to bring in and base is the subject of the pull that you want to merge to.

There’s also a site that can do this for you http://issue2pr.herokuapp.com/ but you will have to give full access to your private repos. Personally I find the curl approach pretty simple and really liked this option. Remember to head over to the stackoverflow question and upvote the answer if you use it!