Stacked Pull Requests

Break a large code change into a chain of small, dependent pull requests that can be reviewed and merged independently, using the gh stack extension for GitHub CLI. Each pull request (PR) contains one focused change, reviewers see only that layer's diff, and GitHub links the PRs together as a stack with a stack map and per-layer navigation.

Source docs: About stacked pull requests · Quickstart · Managing stacks

This feature is in public preview and may need to be enabled for the repository. If commands fail with exit code 9 ("stacked pull requests are not enabled"), report that to the user rather than working around it.

How stacks work

A stack is two or more PRs in the same repository where the bottom PR targets the trunk (usually the default branch) and every PR above it targets the branch of the PR below:

   ┌── feat/frontend     → PR #3 (base: feat/api-endpoints)  ← top
  ┌── feat/api-endpoints → PR #2 (base: feat/auth-layer)
 ┌── feat/auth-layer     → PR #1 (base: main)               ← bottom
main (trunk)