GitHub cherry-pick

Cherry-pick commits across GitHub repositories using only the GitHub API.

Uses the algorithm described by Jim's Stack Overflow answer to perform a cherry-pick entirely through the GitHub REST API. This is much better than doing that through patches (e.g. patch2pr), because git is much smarter with resolving conflicts on commits instead of patches.

When I used patch2pr, I had to constantly rebase my patches, because on almost every update they would raise conflicts. Cherry-picking those commits works perfectly fine!

Installation

Requires Python 3.10+, I recommend using uv, but it will work fine with pip or anything else.

uv tool install ghcherry

Or run directly without installing:

uvx ghcherry --help

Usage

This tool requires a classic token with repo and workflow permissions (workflow is needed only if commits update .github/workflows files) or a fine-grained token with contents and workflows permissions.

If you want to cherry-pick commits in private repositories, the tool also requires Pull requests permission for fine-grained tokens.

GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_... ghcherry \
  --target MyOrg/nixpkgs@patched \
  `: # cherry-pick these commits` \
  NixOS/nixpkgs/3f5ba52cc4701bf341457dfe5f6cb58e0cbb7f83 \
  NixOS/nixpkgs/49ba75ed \
  `: # or merge the entire branch!` \
  Someone/nixpkgs@pr-branch \
  `: # or even cherry-pick every commit for a pull request!` \
  NixOS/nixpkgs#380691

Arguments

You can give commits, branches and or pull requests as positional arguments. Commits will be cherry-picked, while branches will be merged into the target. For pull requests, we will collect PR's commits and add it to the list of commits to cherry-pick.

Each commit/branch/PR is applied in order and builds upon the previous result.

• --target/-T: Required. Target branch to which to apply cherry-picks.
• --first-hard-reset-to/-H: Hard reset target to this commit, before doing anything else.
• --pr-commits-limit: If you specify PR to cherry-pick, this is the maximum amount of commits that the pull request can have.
• --token/-t: GitHub token. If not specified, falls back to the $GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable.

Supported formats:

For commits:

• Owner/RepoName/commit
• https://github.com/Owner/RepoName/commit/09588bb

For branches:

• Owner/RepoName@branch
• https://github.com/Owner/RepoName/tree/branch

For pull requests:

• Owner/RepoName#123
• https://github.com/Owner/RepoName/pull/123

Development

uv sync
uv run pre-commit install

Then commit your changes and send a pull request!

Thanks

• mcstatus for linter settings