How to run extra tests for a pull request

#1

I don’t see how to perform extra tests when building a pull request, but not when building an arbitrary branch.

Suppose that I have a branch, and CircleCI is testing that branch.
The CIRCLE_COMPARE_URL environment is not set on those CircleCI jobs.
(With Travis 2.1 it is necessary to use the iynere/compare-url Orb, but the same principle applies.)

Now, I make a pull request from the branch.
CircleCI doesn’t run again, because the code is the same as was tested previously on the branch.
Therefore, any special handling of branches is not triggered.

Can you suggest how to accomplish my goal, of running code for each pull request?

Thanks in advance for your help!

#2

Can you help me understand what the extra tests would look like. Are these separate tests than the ones that already ran as a part of the original commit?

#3

Yes, the tests are different for pull requests.

As one example, consider the policy that, in a pull request, every new or changed line satisfies some style guideline. That is a way to incrementally bring a legacy project into conformance with a new style guideline.

There is no way for a branch test to enforce such a guideline, because there is no way to know what upstream the branch will be pull-requested into.

Section “Incremental use” in the following shows how to enforce that new/changed Java methods should contain Javadoc comments: