Unable to limit builds to "Only PRs and multiple whitelisted branches"

[rdhelms]

This has been brought up multiple times in previous issues, without any response from CircleCI.

Is there a way to build all PRs to specific branches and those branches themselves?

Could you run builds on master and also a special tag trigger? It is possible to limit builds to a set of branches and named tags. Your workflow in the PR branch would be to add the tag to the head, delete that tag remotely if it exists, and then push the tag with git push --follow-tags. That would be a few lines of Bash scripting, run locally.

Allow branch whitelist to override "Only build pull requests"

I’d like to enable “Only build pull requests” on a project as all feature branches are PR’ed to master and sent to a dev environment. Our production release is simply a push from master to a specific blessed production release branch (prod-release). So the entirety of what I’d like circle to pick up on is: any PR in the github repo any push to prod-release I’ve tried enabling “Only build pull requests” in the settings and adding prod-release to the branch whitelist. PRs built just fine, but…

All we need is to be able to specify additional “allowed” branches beyond just the repo’s default branch. PRs + master is good, but PRs + master + develop + anybranchname would save us a ton of trouble.

[rdhelms]

Another thought - rather than updating the Project Settings to handle specifying multiple branches, maybe it would be easier to provide “PR filtering” on jobs, similar to branch filtering? Something like:

filters
  prs
    only
      - master

^That example would theoretically only run the job for PRs with a target branch of master. If branch filters and pr filters are both specified, the job should run if either of the conditions are met (not all).