Required Reviewer Rule Now GA

GitHub's required reviewer rule for repository rulesets has moved from public preview to general availability. This feature enables organizations and enterprises to enforce granular approval policies, ensuring that specific teams must review and approve changes to designated branches and files before merging.

Key Capabilities

With the required reviewer rule, teams can:

• Enforce approval thresholds — Require a specific number of approvals from designated teams before merging into protected branches
• Precise file targeting — Use pattern matching to apply policies to specific files and folders
• Exclude paths with negation — NEW since preview: Use ! syntax (like .gitignore) to exclude specific files or folders from review requirements
• Enterprise-wide scaling — Apply review policies consistently across repositories, organizations, or entire enterprises

Complementing CODEOWNERS

The required reviewer rule focuses on policy enforcement rather than ownership definition. It augments but does not replace CODEOWNERS files, which remain the best way to manage code ownership and support individual reviewers.

For example, organizations can now:

• Require all *.sql changes to have review approval from the data platform team
• Mandate two security team reviews for authentication file changes before merging to main
• Define flexible rules that scale consistently across teams and repositories

Getting Started

Documentation for repository rulesets is available in GitHub's official docs. Teams can join discussions and share feedback in GitHub Community.