How can I checkout commits from a GitHub PR that have been squash-merged into main?

Question

At $WORK we use the squash-merge strategy with GitHub, however this makes git blame virtually useless. It only shows the squashed merge commit, which may contain many many changes that do not help.

I cannot change our merge strategy, but I would like to be able to checkout the commits of a merged PR (after it has been squashed onto main) locally. Is there a way to do this?

Sure, just fetch the remote branches and checkout whatever commit you need? Assuming they haven't been deleted — Paolo, Apr 05 '23 at 08:40
If you did _not_ delete the original branch, you should still be able to use it. — eftshift0, Apr 05 '23 at 08:40
you are not making it easy on yourselves. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. — eftshift0, Apr 05 '23 at 08:45
@eftshift0 Not true. With GitHub, yes you can. No pull request branch is ever really deleted. — matt, Apr 05 '23 at 10:38
@andrybak's answer already provided insight in that direction and I upvoted it. — eftshift0, Apr 05 '23 at 10:48
`we use the squash-merge strategy with GitHub, however this makes git blame virtually useless.` Which is why squash-merge is an utterly stupid strategy. You ought to make an effort into changing it. — hlovdal, Apr 06 '23 at 19:05

andrybak · Accepted Answer · 2023-04-05T08:59:27.147

You can use the refs/pull/ namespace of refs that GitHub publishes.

For example:

git fetch origin refs/pull/42/head
git checkout FETCH_HEAD

or fetch into a local branch:

git fetch origin refs/pull/42/head:branch_name
git switch branch_name

This ref is available even after the pull request is merged.

You can also list all of such refs currently fetched into local repository using command git ls-remote:

$ git ls-remote origin 'refs/pull/*/head'
3a12346f1d58b3be4742392d9924043a999428a3        refs/pull/1/head
023496783fab0589e7adf59ada4afc5343d7a252        refs/pull/2/head
ee06715454cacde0c5728be56158dadc30da5cac        refs/pull/3/head

Links

Official GitHub documentation
Section "Pull Request Refs" in the Pro Git book
Description of the same feature in Bitbucket in a support Q&A.

How can I checkout commits from a GitHub PR that have been squash-merged into main?

1 Answers1

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