Epicery × Mergify

Epicery tried to keep their pull request up to date with their base branch by constantly rebasing them. This would take a lot of time, even when automated with a script, and would continuously triggers their CI, continuously increasing cost.

The team also had no way to be notified when a pull request was conflicting. That meant the author would be misled thinking its pull request was mergeable, while it was not and would be ignored by reviewers.

Leveraging Mergify, Epicery engineers were able to limit their pull request rebase usage to a bare minimum, saving a lot of CI time. They also were able to build a custom workflow that notifies an author when its pull request needs to be manually updated because of conflicts.

Finally, Epicery engineering team was able to streamline their dependency management updates. They wrote rules that defines precisely how and when to merge them, automating part of their security process.

Mergify changed the way they work:

• They only rebase pull requests when they are ready to be merged.

• They constantly keep their pre-prod branch up to date by using Mergify rebase action. As soon as new commits land in the development branch, the pre-prod branch is rebased and redeployed automatically with the latest version of the code.

• They programmed an interactive onboarding and notification system, guiding (new) users on how to achieve certain tasks.

• They automated label management by specifying how labels should be added to a pull request based on various criterias.

As the team at Epicery is constantly growing and adding new engineers to their team, having everything automated from the ground up makes their software development lifecycle more scalable.

They now continuously rationalize their workflow using Mergify, implementing new mechanisms as they expand, to become more efficient.

Overall, the team easily saves 2 days for each developer per month, skipping manual labor, and saving money from their CI costs.