Usually, you push a commit when you want other contributors to review it. By default, all changes are public, which means any contributor can review the change. There are several situations in which you might want to push a commit but not have other contributors review it. In such cases, you can mark your change as a work in progress.

Some examples of when you might mark a change as a work in progress include:

  • You want to run tests on your change before you officially request for feedback.
  • During a review, you decide you need to rework your change, and you want to stop notifying reviewers until you complete your updates.

You can mark a change as a work in progress using either the command line or the user interface.

Before you begin

  • Verify that you understand the steps in Pushing a Commit to push a change to a remote repository.

Mark a change as work in progress using the command line

From a terminal window, mark the change as a work in progress by adding %wip at the end of a git push command:

git push origin HEAD:refs/for/master%wip

When you’re ready for other contributors to review your change, you can unmark the change using the following command:

git push origin HEAD:refs/for/master%ready

Mark a change as a work in progress using the user interface

  1. Navigate to the Gerrit site for your project. For example, the URL for the Gerrit project is gerrit-review.googlesource.com.
  2. If you have not already done so, sign in using the icon in the upper right corner.
  3. From the main menu bar, select Changes from the Your menu.
  4. Click the change you want to mark as a work in progress. The Change screen opens.
  5. From the More menu, select Mark as work in progress.

To mark the change as ready for review, open the change and click Start Review.