Why exisiting commits are removed?

[pawellabaj]

Exisiting commits in branch are removed

I have a branch 'release/v1.2.3' with commits created by maven release:prepare:

• [ci skip] prepare release v1.2.3
• [ci skip] prepare for next development iteration

I have workflow with following step:

      - name: Create Pull request
        id: pr
        uses: peter-evans/create-pull-request@v4
        with:
          base: main
          branch: release/v1.2.3
          commit-message: "build: [ci skip] automated PR"

After that, existing commits are removed and not merged into main branch, when the PR is merged

How to keep existing commits in the branch?

If this issue is describing a possible bug please provide (or link to) your GitHub Actions workflow.
My workflow: https://github.com/pawellabaj/auto-record/blob/main/.github/workflows/release-published.yml

[taliesins]

I think whats happening is that we are reseting our temporary branch by running /usr/bin/git checkout --progress -B 72b2fac1-b7b7-4060-95a3-1a24a54115e7 HEAD -- when we are checked out on the master branch.

We probably want to delete the second check out that is overwriting the base

   /usr/bin/git symbolic-ref HEAD --short
  release/v0.1.10
  Working base is branch 'release/v0.1.10'
  /usr/bin/git checkout --progress -B 72b2fac1-b7b7-4060-95a3-1a24a54115e7 HEAD --
....
 /usr/bin/git checkout --progress main --
  Switched to branch 'main'
  /usr/bin/git rev-list --reverse release/v0.1.10..72b2fac1-b7b7-4060-95a3-1a24a54115e7 .
  /usr/bin/git checkout --progress -B 72b2fac1-b7b7-4060-95a3-1a24a54115e7 HEAD --

[taliesins]

Actually I think the problem might be:

create-pull-request/src/create-or-update-branch.ts

Line 198 in d7db273

[`${workingBase}..${tempBranch}`, '.'],

this line should probably:

[`${base}..${tempBranch}`, '.'],

as the temp branch is created from the workingBase there will never be a difference. What we want is the base branch plus any changes that happened in the temp branch/workingBase

[pawellabaj]

@taliesins wow! What a quick reaction. Thanks

[peter-evans]

Hi @pawellabaj

The problem is that you are using an existing branch for the branch input. That is not how this action is designed to work. This action creates and updates the pull request branch itself. That's why the commits are being removed.

For your use case, you can either follow this example, or simply use the gh command line tool to create the PR.

[pawellabaj]

Thanks @peter-evans for calrification