mass-approve-prs

name

mass-approve-prs

description

Approve many pull requests at once across a whole GitHub org (or one repo), selecting them by a title heading. Composes two gitculture verbs — `gitculture pr list` (read-only org-wide search) to discover the matches and `gitculture pr approve` (one approving review each) to act — so it inherits gitculture's dry-run-default mutation safety: it shows every PR it *would* approve before you pass --apply. Per-PR failures (most often "can't approve your own pull request") are tallied, not fatal. Use when: a bot opened the same PR across many repos (a dependency bump, a skills sync, a CI change) and you want to approve all the still-open ones in one pass.

Mass-approve PRs by title

When an agent or automation opens the same PR across every repo in an org — "Bump X to Y", "Add eidetic remember/recall memory skills", a CI-config sync — approving them one-by-one in the GitHub UI is slow and error-prone. This skill finds them by title and approves them together, with a dry-run you actually look at first.

The shape (why two verbs, not one)

• Discovery is read-only. gitculture pr list <org> --title <…> scans the org via the GitHub Search API and re-checks each title client-side (the Search API's in:title is fuzzy, so an exact/prefix re-check kills false positives). Nothing is written.
• Approval is one reviewable mutation per PR. gitculture pr approve <owner>/<repo> <number> submits a single APPROVE review, dry-run by default. Keeping the write verb single-PR is deliberate: every mutation is inspectable, and a batch can't half-apply some giant opaque change.

The script just loops the second over the output of the first.

Run it

Always dry-run first and read the matched list:

# Dry-run: list matches + show the approval each would get. No writes.
.claude/skills/mass-approve-prs/scripts/mass-approve-prs.sh \
  --org agentculture --title "Add eidetic remember/recall memory skills"

# Looks right? Approve them all:
.claude/skills/mass-approve-prs/scripts/mass-approve-prs.sh \
  --org agentculture --title "Add eidetic remember/recall memory skills" --apply

Useful flags:

• --match exact|prefix|substring — how --title is compared (case-insensitive, whitespace-stripped). Default exact; use prefix when the heading is a stable start but repos append a suffix, substring to cast wider. Start strict, widen only if the dry-run under-matches.
• --state open|closed|all — default open (the usual "approve the ones still open").
• --repo NAME — restrict to one repo (lists its pulls directly instead of searching the org).
• --body "<note>" — the review comment posted with each approval. Defaults to a signed note (Approved via gitculture mass-approve-prs skill. — Claude) so it's clear an assistant approved; pass --body "" for a bare approval.

Reading the result

The dry-run prints the matched PRs (owner/repo#number (author) title) and, per PR, the JSON body it would POST. The apply run prints a summary:

=== Summary ===
  approved: 7
  skipped:  1  (self-authored)
  failed:   0

• skipped (self-authored) — GitHub forbids approving your own PR (HTTP 422). If the bot that opened the PRs is the same identity as your token, every PR will skip; approve with a different account.
• failed — anything else (permissions, a closed PR, transport). The script keeps going and exits non-zero at the end so CI/automation notices.

Requirements

• python3 (stdlib only — used to parse pr list --json).
• gitculture on PATH, or run from the ghafi checkout (the script falls back to uv run --project <repo> gitculture).
• Auth via GITHUB_TOKEN / GH_TOKEN; the script bridges gh auth token when neither is set. Approving needs the repo scope (classic PAT) or a fine-grained token with Pull requests: write.

Notes

• Re-running approves again (GitHub allows multiple reviews per PR); it is not idempotent, but a second identical approval is harmless.
• This approves — it does not merge. Merging stays a separate, deliberate step.