GitHub’s pull requests are an important part of my/ our development process. That’s why I was thinking about creating a template that will enforce the standards.

My goal is to fill the pull request’s textarea with a predefined template. Ideally, when we open a PR we will start filling sections and not trying to remember what has to be added. Unfortunately GitHub doesn’t offer such functionality. There is no way to define a template for pull requests. So I ended up by using a bookmarklet. A small piece of JavaScript that will be run in the context of the GitHub’s page.

How to write and use bookmarklet

Bookmarklets are actually bookmarks that point to a JavaScript code. For example:

<a href="javascript:alert(location.href);"> Drag me to your bookmarks toolbar </a>

If we drag the link to our browser’s toolbar it will become a normal bookmark. Once we click it we’ll get the location of the current page. So, the writing of bookmarklet means writing one line JavaScript that we place in a link. Installing the bookmarklet is dragging the link to our bookmarks toolbar.

Pretty powerful technique which I used for creating a pull request template.

The template

What I want in the end is to populate the GitHub’s textarea with the following:

# Ticket # Task/Problem # Solution # Steps to reproduce # UAT steps: # Code review - [ ] Unit tests passed - [ ] System tests passed

And here is the JavaScript:

(function(){ var textareaId = '#pull_request_body'; var textarea = document.querySelector(textareaId); var template = ''; var firstLine; template += firstLine = 'Ticket: '; template += '\

\

'; template += '## Task/Problem\

\

'; template += '## Solution\

\

'; template += '## Steps to reproduce\

\

'; template += '## UAT\

\

'; template += '## Code review\

\

\

'; template += '- [ ] Unit tests passed\

'; template += '- [ ] System tests passed\

'; if (textarea) { textarea.value = template; textarea.focus(); textarea.scrollTop = 0; textarea.selectionStart = textarea.selectionEnd = firstLine.length; } else { alert('You are either not on the PR page or there is no ' + textareaId + ' element.'); } })();

The textarea of the pull request in GitHub has a pull_request_body as an id. Yes, you are right. If GitHub decides to change its markup then our bookmarklet will be broken. Unfortunately that’s something that we have to live with.

textarea.value = template; is the place where we set the template. After that there are three lines of code that provide a little bit better developer experience. We bring the focus to the textarea, we scroll it to the top and place the cursor after Ticket: so we may start writing the PR directly. Without the need of clicking somewhere.

The bookmarklet is ready but it’s not a one liner. Let’s use uglifyjs for that.

npm install uglify-js@1 -g uglifyjs ./src/Pull_request_template.js > Pull_request_template.min.js

The minified code can not be used directly in the HTML page because it may contain quotes. For example:

<a href="javascript: (function(){var a = "test"})()">drag me</a>

This will not work because the content of the href attribute is wrapped in double quotes and our bookmarklet contains double quotes too. So we need one more step to clean our JavaScript by replacing " with ' (single quotes). I created a small repository for displaying bookmarklets and there is a function that does this job: