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Pull Request (PR)

By Sitraka Forler · Lecturer, Durham Business SchoolUpdated 13 September 2026 About this site

A request to review the changes on a branch and merge them into another, usually main.

You push a branch and open a pull request on a hosting site such as GitHub; teammates review the changes and automated checks run before anyone merges it. GitLab calls the same thing a merge request (MR). Despite the name it is not the git pull command (which brings changes from the remote into your current branch): it is a review page on the hosting site that asks the maintainers to pull your changes in.

Example

git push -u origin feature/sharpe
# then open the PR from the terminal with gh, the GitHub command-line tool:
gh pr create --base main --title "feat: add Sharpe ratio" --body "Adds the helper and its tests."

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