Preview the New Combined Status API

What does it mean for a branch to be “green?” The Status API helps thousands of teams answer that question. Developers use it to record the status of continuous integration builds, contributor license agreements, code coverage analysis, automated security testing, dependency management, and more.

For many teams, a branch is considered “green” only when all of their various status checks are successful. With the new Combined Status API, developers can easily fetch this single, consolidated status for any branch, commit, or tag.

Status context

To help multiple service providers use the Status API simultaneously, statuses now support a context field. This field allows a provider to distinguish its statuses from another provider’s statuses. For example, your Jenkins builds might use a context of ci/jenkins, while your Brakeman checks might adopt a context of security/brakeman.

The new Combined Status endpoint returns a single, combined state, as well as the latest status from each context. Systems that consume status updates can now get all the information they need in one place.

Opt-in

The existing Status API continues to work as it always has. The context field is entirely optional, and the color of the merge button on pull requests does not currently take context into account.

Preview period

We’re making this new API available today for developers to preview. During this period, we may change aspects of the Combined Status API from time to time. We will announce any changes here (on the developer blog), but we will not provide any advance notice.

We expect the preview period to last 30-60 days. At the end of preview period, the Combined Status API will become an official component of GitHub API v3. At that point, this new API will be stable and suitable for production use.

We hope you’ll try it out and send us your feedback!