[jpulec]

I launched mergecaravan.com to deal with a problem I've encountered at a few jobs in the past. Mostly, I built it initially to scratch my own itch, and to go back to doing more django dev.

Basically, you can add a label to a PR in github and it will then queue it up to be merged once all the required checks pass, and it keeps queued PRs "up-to-date".

It's made a little money, but not much.

Github recently rolled out a feature at Github Universe that has overlap, so I'm guessing it won't get much more traction.

A few lessons I learned: - Especially when building on a platform, make sure you have the right niche. In this case, it probably has a wide enough audience that Github decided it was worth it to build as part of the platform. - Like any engineer, I spent too long building and let scope creep delay me from launching.

All in all, it's pretty cheap (read: basically free) to run, but I probably committed somewhere over 120 hours on it.

[TheDong]

That sounds almost exactly like bors-ng: https://github.com/bors-ng/bors-ng#a-merge-bot-for-github-pu...

There was also homu, which predated bors and also did more or less the exact same thing.

Does your thing have any features that differentiate it from what bors does?

[jpulec]

You don't have to host it yourself ;)

Beyond that, there are a couple of things that I don't believe bors has.

A big one that I built for myself was the idea of supporting "working hours", i.e. only merge code during this timeframe.

For example, one company I worked for had some pretty flaky tests. Unfortunately, what would happen is we would have several PRs get reviewed and then use a tool like bors to enqueue them. Inevitably, some queued PR would have a failed check for this flaky test.

Fast forward to the weekend and a completely different developer would merge a hotfix into master. Unfortunately, a side effect would be that a tool like bors would try to merge the head commit into the PR with the flaky test, and now it passes! So it gets deployed at a random unexpected time, which isn't what we wanted.

[steve_taylor]

Gitlab also has merge trains. Atlassian open sourced Landkid which does the same thing, initially just for Bitbucket Cloud, but it’s pluggable.