MergeDeps Time-based Blocking

Last month I released MergeDeps in order to allow developers and teams to easily blocked Pull Request merges based on dependencies.

Today, I’m announcing that MergeDeps can now block merges based on time.

Often times you may not want a PR to be merged before a specific date or time. Especially with a Continuous Deployment pipeline in place, you do not want to merge code into your main branch before you want it deployed. While code-based conditional checks and feature-flags can help address this, not all projects have these in place.

MergeDeps allows you to have your Pull Request ready and waiting, without the risk of it getting merged preemptively.

Making use of this new functionality is simple, and is already live on all MergeDeps accounts.

Simply include a Blocked until <timestamp> line in your Pull Request description.

We will automatically recognize most common <timestamp> formats. At a technical level, we use the parse functionality of the python dateutil package.

For example:

Hopefully this new feature will prove helpful, and feel free to request any additional features directly.