So far, we explored the main functionality of pull requests. Let's see a couple of things that leverage their power even more.
In Chapter 1, Brief Repository Overview and Usage of the Issue Tracker, in the Tips and tricks section, you learned how to reference issues inside the issue tracker. Extending this ability, you can reference issue numbers in commit messages in order to close some issues when the commit is merged to the default branch.
For this action to be triggered, you have to use some keywords. For example, Closes #42 in the commit message will close issue 42 when that commit is merged with the default branch.
As per the GitHub documentation, the following keywords will close an issue via a commit message:
close
closes
closed
fix
fixes
fixed
resolve
resolves
resolved
Let's take, for example, an open issue like the following one and note down its number, which in this case is 2:
Then, make a commit, which in its message has one of the preceding...