Add feature to disable pull requests on a repository

Like disabling Wiki and Issues in the project's Settings view I would like to be able to disable pull requests on a repository.

This will be very useful for projects which have only a mirror on GitHub and they DON'T want to use GitHub's pull request mechanism for accepting contributions.
Or a project open sourced by a company is in the process of accepting GitHub pull requests but not yet, they still have some work to do internally before they are ready. (e.g. Google's TensorFlow project used to not accept pull requests through GitHub at the very beginning, but now they do)

Mirror examples:

Linux kernel - 92 people wasted their time sending pull requests because they haven't read how to contribute to the Linux kernel guide
Qt project - GitHub is only used as a mirror and not accepting contributions through it, they use their own Gerrit instance
kdeconnect-kde - GitHub is only used as a mirror and not accepting contributions through it
kdeconnect-android - GitHub is only used as a mirror and not accepting contributions through it

And many others... the maintainer(s) of the project have to tell people every time that submitting pull requests through GitHub is NOT the way to contribute to the project, and to keep telling them to read the contributing guidelines and close their pull request:

https://github.com/qtproject/qtbase/pull/6

Having the option to disable pull requests on a project would solve this problem.

Wouldn't this be covered by this?

Issues and pull requests are often created without any adherence to the CONTRIBUTING.md contribution guidelines, due to the inconspicuous nature of the “guidelines for contributing” link when creating an issue and the fact that it often contains a lot of information that isn’t relevant to opening issues

Surprisingly, https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues doesn't seem to have an issue for this yet (or my search-fu is failing me).

Look for the solution adopted by @GNOME https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2016-November/msg00043.html

cron to the rescue!

I feel dear-github is talking about the concerns of open source maintainers. But this one is a huge concern for drive-by contributors like myself. My profile is full of repos that are forks for one-off contributions, and I can't clearly indicate their second-class nature, nor can I highlight the repos that I do want to welcome contributions to. Being able to disable accepting pull requests would help for this purpose.

My profile is full of repos that are forks for one-off contributions, and I can't clearly indicate their second-class nature, nor can I highlight the repos that I do want to welcome contributions to. Being able to disable accepting pull requests would help for this purpose.

Agreed. Ideally, in this case, an option that redirects PRs to the upstream fork would be the best possible outcome.

I'm tired of asking users not to submit pull requests to a repo I forked, too, e.g., https://github.com/yihui/roxygen2/pulls

I need this feature too.
I think it is good.

Forked repos should likely be handled differently than the original. If you just want to contribute forking seems too heavy weight.

This would be also extremely helpful for a repo set up for a company's coding challenge. I've had issues with candidates in the past putting up a PR to our repo instead of forking ours and putting the PR on their repo. Once a PR is created, our repo is effectively spoiled, since any future candidates simply have to look at the closed PRs and see all the solutions people have written in the past. There's no way (that I've found) to remove them. Preventing them would be great.

👍 +1

@ehamiter

@ehamiter The only way that I know is that you simply mirror here and host somewhere else.
Gitea lets you hide the status and mirrored Github instances cant accept Pull-Requests.

I want this too.

This would be awesome for all monorepos that are on the rise in PHP world in last 2 years

Is there a way to disable pull requests on a particular branch to the main/master branch? If so, please help me how to configure this, thanks in advance.

Looking for this to. We want to have the development branch to be without pr

This workaround could be useful until there support in the repo settings to disable PRs.

https://github.com/marketplace/actions/close-pull-request

This Action subscribes to pull_request_target events. When receiving a pull_request_target event, this action closes the pull request triggered by the event immediately.

This workaround could be useful until there support in the repo settings to disable PRs.

https://github.com/marketplace/actions/close-pull-request

This Action subscribes to pull_request_target events. When receiving a pull_request_target event, this action closes the pull request triggered by the event immediately.

But if the repo is a code challenge, the "answer" will keep in "closed pull request"

Wake me up when the feature arrives.

code challenge

In this case, it's not enough to disable pull requests. You'd have to disable forking entirely.

Use a private repo, and disable forking on it. Invite only the challenged to view the repo. Publish the repo only after the challenge is complete. Or IDK, maybe you have something else in mind. Is this a challenge that's open to the whole world?

Other services might suit this use case better actually.

PS: Dear GitHub, please add feature to disable pull requests on a repository. You can literally just put a checkbox in Settings > Features and hide the tab if checked...

In that case, you'd have to disable cloning also, which is impossible. However, there's tons of other valid use cases to disable PRs on a repo, so it doesn't really matter that that single use case doesn't really work.

The OpenLDAP project mirror is another case where we do not want PR's to be made via GitHub.

It is currently impossible to disable pull requests on Github

bump

It's only been 8 years, c'mon we can do this guys

From isaacs/GitHub

Just use the official channel

Upvote the feature here

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/8907

Currently relevant "Exploring Solutions to Tackle Low-Quality Contributions on GitHub"
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/185387

Hi, this feature has finally arrived! GitHub has introduced new repository settings for configuring pull request access.

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aeneasr commented on Jan 18, 2016

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