Troubleshooting
If Kodiak isn't working as expected, feel free to file a GitHub Issue or email us at support@kodiakhq.com.
Workarounds
Editing a pull request (changing title, editing labels, etc.) will trigger Kodiak to evaluate the pull request for mergeability. If you think Kodiak's status check is stuck, editing a pull request may help.
Known issues
Branch protection requirement
Kodiak intentionally requires branch protection to be enabled to function, Kodiak won't activate if branch protection is disabled.
Commit signature support
Kodiak is able to create signatures for merge and squash commits, but not rebase merges due to GitHub API limitations. (kodiak#89)
CodeOwners
GitHub CODEOWNERS is only fully supported with update.always. In other cases, partial support exists where Kodiak will be able to merge the PR once all checks pass, but Kodiak will update out of date PRs if a Code Owner review is the only requirement blocking merge. (kodiak#87)
Restricting pushes
If you use the "Restrict who can push to matching branches" branch protection setting you must add Kodiak as an allowed user, like the following screenshot.
Kodiak will not be able to merge pull requests without this and you will receive a mysterious "Merging blocked by GitHub requirements" status check.
Kodiak "Merging blocked by GitHub requirements" status check
If you see Kodiak providing a status check of "Merging blocked by GitHub requirements", this likely means there is a branch protection setting that conflicts with Kodiak. If you see this issue persistently please contact us at support@kodiakhq.com.
Merge Errors
It is dangerous to retry merging a pull request when GitHub returns an internal server error (HTTP status code 500) because the merge can partially succeed in a way that will leave the pull request open, but the branch merged.
This state where the branch has been merged but the pull request remains open would trigger Kodiak to erroneously merge in the pull request multiple times, as we've seen in #397. To prevent this behavior Kodiak will disable itself on a pull request if it encounters an internal server error when merging a pull request.
If Kodiak set the disable_bot_label label (default "kodiak:disabled") on your pull request you can remove the label to re-enable Kodiak. GitHub API instability is usually brief.