Every 5 minutes

Get pinged when a pull request is opened

You hear about each new pull request within minutes of it being opened.

Runs: Every 5 minutes
Apps: GitHub
AI: Not needed
Access: Pull requests: read

Send this to your assistant

Create a ClickRuntime automation: send me a Slack message within 5 minutes whenever a new pull request is opened in acme/app, with the title, author and link.

Paste it into your assistant. It tells you what it will send or change before it runs live.

Add to ChatGPT Add to Claude

First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.

Why use it

Why teams use this automation

If you maintain a project or lead a code review rota, the time between a pull request being opened and someone responding decides how contributors feel about the project. A first-time contributor who opens a PR and hears nothing for three days rarely opens a second one. An internal PR on a release branch can hold up a deploy simply because the right person was not told it existed.

Every 5 minutes the repository's pull requests are listed by creation date. Any PR that has not been announced yet is posted to Slack with its title, author and link, and its ID is remembered. The post arrives soon after the PR opens, so the first reply can too.

Open source maintainers and team leads who want fast first responses can get the most from it. Teams with a formal review rota can also use it to confirm that every PR was seen.

What you get out of it

First responses arrive quickly
Hearing about a PR within minutes makes a welcoming comment possible the same hour, which shapes whether a new contributor sticks around. Fast welcomes turn drive-by contributors into regulars, which is how small projects grow their maintainer base.
Release-blocking PRs get seen
A change aimed at a release branch reaches the people who must approve it immediately, avoiding the afternoon where a deploy is waiting on a review nobody knew about. Quick replies also reveal blockers early.
Reviewers can volunteer in the open
Posting to a channel lets teammates reply with a quick I'll take it, which spreads review work more evenly than leaving it all to the same person. Visible volunteering makes the workload fairer and the reviewers less likely to burn out.
No emails to filter through
GitHub's own notification emails mix with everything else, so a single clear Slack message per PR is easier to notice than a line in a crowded inbox. It also works on a phone, where a notification is hard to ignore.
Every PR announced exactly once
Remembering announced IDs prevents repeats, so the channel stays readable even in a busy repository with several new PRs an hour. Readers trust a feed that never repeats itself, so they keep paying attention to it over months and busy weeks.

How it works

What happens, step by step

Every five minutes, the automation checks your GitHub repo for newly opened pull requests.
It skips any it has already posted.
Each new pull request is posted to your Slack channel with its number, title, author and link.

Before it runs live

Connect GitHub

What you get

RunsEvery 5 minutes

Get pinged when a pull request is openedtoday, 9:00Succeeded

Slack · #devNew PR #489: Fix timezone in weekly report by mlopez https://github.com/acme/app/pull/489

Build your own

Need it to work differently?

This template is a starting point. Copy the prompt and change it, or describe a different automation from scratch, with your own conditions, more apps or an AI step. Your assistant writes it, tests it and runs it on ClickRuntime.

Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.

Changes you can ask for

Act only on the items that match your own rules, and skip the rest
Add an AI step, for example to summarize, sort or draft a reply
Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
Combine it with other GitHub steps into one automation

Under the hood

The code that runs this automation

This is the Python script that runs each time the automation starts. Your AI assistant writes it for you when you send the prompt, and you allow each step in your assistant. To change how the automation works, describe the change to your assistant and it updates the script for you. For every function it can use, see the script reference.

get_alerted_on_each_new_pull_request.pyexample

from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, http, state, notify, report_fetched

def gh(method, path, **kw):
    resp = http.request(method, f"https://api.github.com{path}", headers={
        "Authorization": f"Bearer {credentials.connection('github', 'work')}",
        "Accept": "application/vnd.github+json"}, **kw)
    resp.raise_for_status()
    return resp.json() if resp.content else None

REPO = "acme/app"

@on_trigger
def run(event):
    prs = gh("GET", f"/repos/{REPO}/pulls", params={"state": "open", "sort": "created", "direction": "desc", "per_page": 30})
    last = state.get("last_number")
    new = [p for p in prs if last is not None and p["number"] > last]
    report_fetched(len(new))
    if prs:
        state.set("last_number", max([p["number"] for p in prs] + [last or 0]))
    if not new:
        return {"posted": 0}
    for p in reversed(new):
        notify.slack(f"New PR #{p['number']}: {p['title']} by {p['user']['login']}\n{p['html_url']}", channel="#dev")
    return {"posted": len(new)}

FAQ

Common questions

Does it announce pull requests from forks?

Yes. Pull requests opened from forks are listed with the others, because they appear in the repository's PR list. Each message shows the author, so you can tell outside contributors from teammates. The author is shown in every message.

Can I ignore pull requests from bots?

You can. Ask for authors such as dependabot to be skipped, or for only certain labels or target branches to be announced. The filter is applied before posting, so skipped PRs never reach Slack. Nothing else is changed in the flow.

Why check every 5 minutes instead of using a webhook?

Polling needs no setup in your GitHub repository settings and works with a token alone. Five minutes is quick enough for most teams, and it is easy to see in the run history when it last checked.

What permissions does it need?

Pull requests: read. Nothing else in your accounts is used.

Does it need AI?

No. It runs without AI, so it doesn't use your plan's AI allowance.

How many runs does it use?

One run each time it checks. Checks that find nothing new and stop right away aren't counted.

Can I change how it works?

Yes. Describe the change to your AI assistant, for example a different schedule, channel or filter. It updates the automation, tests it and tells you what changed.

Every 5 minutes