Stale PR Reminder

Overview

FlowLibs - Stale PR Reminder is a weekly scheduled cloud flow that hunts down neglected pull requests in a GitHub repository and nudges the author (with a CC to a dev-leads distribution list) so review queues keep flowing instead of piling up.

Every Monday at 8:00 AM Eastern the flow lists all open pull requests for a configured {owner}/{repo}, filters down to those whose updated_at timestamp is older than a configurable day threshold, and sends a personalized HTML email to each stale-PR author at {login}@{domain} with a summary of the PR and a polite ask to rebase or push updates.

Use Case

Engineering teams lose momentum when PRs sit open for weeks with no activity — reviewers forget context, branches drift behind main, and merge conflicts compound. Rather than relying on chat nudges or a human playing review-queue traffic cop, this flow automates the courtesy reminder on a predictable weekly cadence. The reminder is personalized, which makes it feel less like spam and more like a helpful heads-up.

The flow is ideal for teams that:

• Teams with persistent open-PR backlogs and no formal review SLA.
• Need visibility for dev leads without forcing them to scrape GitHub by hand.
• Want personalized reminders rather than a generic team broadcast.
• Already use Outlook for engineering communications.

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Change target repo

Update flowlibs_GitHubOwner and flowlibs_GitHubRepository env vars.

Adjust staleness threshold

Update flowlibs_StalePrDaysThreshold (e.g. 3 for aggressive, 14 for lenient).

Route CC to a different list

Update flowlibs_PrReminderCcEmail to any single address or semicolon-separated list.

Change email domain for author resolution

Update flowlibs_PrAuthorEmailDomain. For non-aligned domains, replace with an Office 365 Users SearchUser lookup.

Change schedule

Modify the trigger recurrence (daily, twice-weekly, different time zone).

Scale beyond 100 PRs

Wrap GetPullRequests in a Do-Until loop incrementing the page query parameter until the response is empty.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

addDays(utcNow(), mul(-1, variables('varStalePrDaysThreshold')))

less(items('For_Each_Pull_Request')?['updated_at'], variables('varStaleCutoffUtc'))

concat(items('For_Each_Pull_Request')?['user']?['login'], '@', variables('varPrAuthorEmailDomain'))

concat('Reminder: your pull request #', string(items('For_Each_Pull_Request')?['number']), ' is still open')