gh pr merge --auto merges the PR if auto-merge isn't enabled/required

Describe the bug

I want to always enable auto-merge after filing a PR if it is supported by the repo.

However I never want to merge a PR without review, even if the repo hooks allow it.

Today if a PR has no pending required checks, the gh CLI merges it immediately, instead of enabling auto-merge.

Affected version

❯ gh version
gh version 2.96.0 (2026-07-02)
https://github.com/cli/cli/releases/tag/v2.96.0

Steps to reproduce the behavior

Run gh pr merge --auto
See that the PR is directly merged

Expected vs actual behavior

I wanted auto-merge to be enabled, or for the command to fail.

This is a duplicate of #8514, which tracked the same behavior: gh pr merge --auto merges the PR immediately when there are no pending required checks, rather than enabling auto-merge mode. That issue was recently closed (2026-07-09); please follow it for context and any future resolution.

Generated by Issue Triage (skills-driven) for #13880 · 19.7 AIC · ⌖ 3.94 AIC · ⊞ 5.1K · ◷

Responding to #8514 (comment):

Going to close this out due to staleness and housekeeping. The challenge with this situation is that it's likely largely due to how the API behaves with regard to auto merging. Auto merging isn't much of a client side feature here - we just indicate in the API call to auto merge.

If there's a specific recent reproducible case that people keep running into, let's start a fresh issue and be sure to include the GH_DEBUG=api output for us to investigate 🙏

Basically the behaviour I would like is:

UI shows	Expected behaviour	Screenshot
Auto merge	Enable auto-merge
Mergeable	Do nothing
Merge blocked	Do nothing

This seems to do the thing I want to do: gibfahn/dot@8ac176f

Thank you for your issue! We have categorized it as an enhancement (feature or improvement) request, and it has been added to our backlog. In doing so, we are not committing to implementing this feature at this time, but, we will consider it for future releases based on community feedback and our own product roadmap.

Unless you see the help wanted Contributions welcome label, we are not currently looking for external contributions for this feature.

If you come across this issue and would like to see it implemented, please add a thumbs up! This will help us prioritize the feature. Please only comment if you have additional information or viewpoints to contribute.

fix(auto-merge): retry the merge when a sibling image-updater PR move…

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`gh pr merge --auto` merges the PR if auto-merge isn't enabled/required #13880

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gh pr merge --auto merges the PR if auto-merge isn't enabled/required #13880

Description

Describe the bug

Affected version

Steps to reproduce the behavior

Expected vs actual behavior

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cli-triage commented on Jul 14, 2026

gibfahn commented on Jul 14, 2026

gibfahn commented on Jul 14, 2026

github-actions commented on Jul 15, 2026

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`gh pr merge --auto` merges the PR if auto-merge isn't enabled/required #13880