autoprat

autoprat finds GitHub pull requests and, when asked to act, prints the gh commands to do it.

It is for maintainers who already live in GitHub, Prow-style slash commands, bot PRs, CI labels, and bulk triage.

autoprat never changes a pull request itself. It only queries GitHub and writes output to stdout. With action flags, that output is gh commands. Nothing is approved, held, closed, merged, or commented on until you run those commands yourself -- usually by piping them to sh after reading them. Reviewing the output before running it is the point of the tool.

Install

Prerequisites:

• gh installed and authenticated
• Rust, if installing from source

cargo install --git https://github.com/frobware/autoprat.git

From a checkout:

cargo build --release

Use autoprat --help for the current flag list.

Basic Use

List matching PRs:

autoprat -r org/repo --needs-approve
autoprat -r org/repo --failing-ci
autoprat -r org/repo --author dependabot

Generate commands:

autoprat -r org/repo --author dependabot --approve

Run them after reviewing:

autoprat -r org/repo --author dependabot --approve | sh

Prow-style action names work as positional slash commands too:

autoprat -r org/repo /approve
autoprat -r org/repo /lgtm
autoprat -r org/repo /ok-to-test
autoprat -r org/repo /retest
autoprat -r org/repo /hold

/close and /merge are accepted as well.

Selecting PRs

Work from a repository:

autoprat -r org/repo --needs-lgtm
autoprat -r org/repo --needs-approve --author alice

Target specific PRs:

autoprat -r org/repo 123 456
autoprat -r org/repo 123-127
autoprat https://github.com/org/repo/pull/123

Ranges are inclusive. 123-127 means 123 124 125 126 127. Add -d for the detailed view of the selected PRs.

Exclude PRs from a wider selection:

autoprat -r org/repo --needs-approve --exclude 123,456 --approve
autoprat -r org/repo --needs-lgtm --exclude 120-130 --lgtm
autoprat -r org/repo --exclude https://github.com/org/repo/pull/789 --hold

Search multiple repositories:

autoprat -r org/backend -r org/frontend --failing-ci
autoprat -r org/repo1 -r org/repo2 --author dependabot --approve

Or use PR URLs when the selection spans repositories:

autoprat \
  https://github.com/org/backend/pull/123 \
  https://github.com/org/frontend/pull/456

Common Workflows

Approve trusted bot PRs:

autoprat -r org/repo --author dependabot --approve
autoprat -r org/repo --author dependabot --approve | sh

Handle PRs waiting for test permission:

autoprat -r org/repo --needs-ok-to-test
autoprat -r org/repo --needs-ok-to-test --ok-to-test | sh

Find PRs missing merge preconditions:

autoprat -r org/repo --needs-approve
autoprat -r org/repo --needs-lgtm
autoprat -r org/repo --needs-approve --needs-lgtm

Retest failing PRs:

autoprat -r org/repo --failing-ci
autoprat -r org/repo --failing-ci --retest | sh

Target one failing check:

autoprat -r org/repo --failing-check "ci/test-flaky"
autoprat -r org/repo --failing-check "ci/test-flaky" \
  --comment "/override ci/test-flaky" | sh

Hold a set of PRs:

autoprat -r org/repo --title "(?i)api" --hold
autoprat -r org/repo --title "(?i)api" --hold | sh

Merge PRs that already satisfy your labels:

autoprat -r org/repo --label approved --label lgtm --merge

Find bot PRs that are not single-commit updates:

autoprat -r org/repo --author red-hat-konflux --commits ">1"
autoprat -r org/repo --author red-hat-konflux --commits 1 --lgtm

Use a raw GitHub search query when the built-in filters are not enough:

autoprat --query "repo:org/repo author:dependabot created:>2026-01-01"
autoprat --query "repo:org/repo status:failure comments:>5"

is:pr and is:open are added to raw queries when you do not specify them.

Safety

autoprat never acts on a PR itself; in action mode it only prints the gh commands, and piping to sh is the only step that changes anything, so nothing happens to a PR until you choose to run the output. The normal workflow is to look before you run:

# 1. Inspect the matching PRs.
autoprat -r org/repo --needs-approve

# 2. Inspect the commands.
autoprat -r org/repo --needs-approve --approve

# 3. Run them.
autoprat -r org/repo --needs-approve --approve | sh

Built-in comment actions avoid obvious duplicates:

• --approve only comments when the PR does not already have approved
• --lgtm only comments when the PR does not already have lgtm
• --ok-to-test only comments when the PR has needs-ok-to-test
• --hold only comments when the PR does not already have do-not-merge/hold

--close, --merge, --retest, and custom --comment actions are direct requests.

--throttle suppresses a comment if the same body was posted recently:

autoprat -r org/repo --failing-ci --comment "/retest" --throttle 30m | sh

The commit limit guard stops you acting blindly on a bot PR that carries more commits than you would expect. When an action is requested, autoprat refuses to emit commands if any targeted PR has more commits than --commit-limit allows. The default is 1: routine bot updates (Dependabot, Konflux, and the like) are almost always a single commit, so a targeted PR with more is unusual and worth a look before you act on it.

autoprat -r org/repo --author red-hat-konflux --commits ">1"
autoprat -r org/repo --author red-hat-konflux --lgtm --commit-limit 50 | sh

Use --exclude to skip individual PRs instead of raising the limit for everything.

Output

Without action flags, autoprat prints matching PRs.

Useful views:

autoprat -r org/repo --failing-ci
autoprat -r org/repo --failing-ci -d
autoprat -r org/repo --failing-ci -D
autoprat -r org/repo --quiet

-d shows a detailed PR tree. -D also tries to fetch error logs for failing checks. --quiet prints PR numbers only.

When stdout is not a terminal, the default table becomes tab-separated output with no header. Boolean columns are 1/0, and timestamps are RFC3339. Use this for scripts.

autoprat -r org/repo --needs-approve > prs.tsv

Set AUTOPRAT_FORCE_TTY=1 if you want the human table while piping:

AUTOPRAT_FORCE_TTY=1 autoprat -r org/repo --failing-ci | less -R

Use -S when watching output in a narrow terminal:

watch -n 180 'autoprat -r org/repo --failing-ci -S'

CI Status

The CI column is compressed so it fits in a table.

Examples:

• Success: all checks passed
• Failed: 1/2: one of two checks failed
• F:2 C:1 (3/5): two failed, one cancelled, five total
• S:4 F:0 X:1 Q:2 (4/7): four succeeded, one running, two queued
• Unknown: no usable check state

Prow merge-prerequisite states are not treated as active CI. Use the label columns to see approved, lgtm, needs-ok-to-test, and hold state.

Debugging

Tracing uses RUST_LOG:

RUST_LOG=autoprat=debug autoprat -r org/repo -D
RUST_LOG=autoprat::github=debug autoprat -r org/repo
RUST_LOG=autoprat::log_fetcher=debug autoprat -r org/repo -D

Development

cargo fmt --check
cargo test
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings

License

MIT