Safer Blog Publishing with PRs

My blog publish script kept breaking. Every time I ran it, something went wrong with git - wrong branch, out of sync with remote, push rejected.

The problem

The original script did this:

git add post.mdx
git commit -m "New post"
git push origin master

Simple, but fragile. If I was on a different branch, it’d commit there but try to push to master. If master had diverged, push would fail.

What I changed

Switched to a PR-based workflow:

# 1. Fetch latest master
git fetch origin master

# 2. Create branch from remote master
BLOG_BRANCH="blog/${SLUG}"
git checkout -b "$BLOG_BRANCH" origin/master

# 3. Commit
git add "${POSTS_DIR}/${FILENAME}"
git commit -m "blog: ${TITLE}"

# 4. Push branch
git push -u origin "$BLOG_BRANCH"

# 5. Create PR
gh pr create \
  --title "blog: ${TITLE}" \
  --base master \
  --head "$BLOG_BRANCH"

Now no matter what state my local repo is in, the script:

1. Always creates a fresh branch from latest remote master
2. Pushes to its own branch (no conflicts)
3. Creates a PR for review

Extra bits

Added some nice-to-haves:

# Check if PR already exists
EXISTING_PR=$(gh pr list --head "$BLOG_BRANCH" --json number --jq '.[0].number')
if [ -n "$EXISTING_PR" ]; then
  echo "PR already exists: #${EXISTING_PR}"
fi

# Handle case where file was written on different branch
if [ ! -f "$FILEPATH" ]; then
  git checkout "$ORIGINAL_BRANCH" -- "${POSTS_DIR}/${FILENAME}"
fi

Why this is better

• Can’t accidentally push broken stuff to master
• Can review the post in PR before publishing
• Works regardless of local git state
• Idempotent - running twice doesn’t break anything

The extra step of merging a PR is worth it for the peace of mind.