Require review from specific team setting specifics?

[bui-andrew]

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Question

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Hi, I'm looking to get some clarity on the Require review from specific team setting on branch rulesets. Previous to this feature, we wanted to add a member from senior-eng-team to be a required reviewer, without notifying everyone in the group (large 60+ group). We wanted the author to look through the group and pick an appropriate reviewer. We also wanted to use the merge queue.

To accomplish this, we had:

• a branch protection rule with senior-eng-team in the Restrict who can push to matching branches list.
• a ruleset on the same branch merge queue enabled.

Together, those two settings made it so that for any PR targeting that branch, only a member of senior-eng-team can see the 'Merge when ready' button. It didn't necessarily require a review, but it would implicitly, since the author needed to find a senior-eng-team member to click 'Merge when ready'.

I found this setting Require review from specific team that seems to be able to better accomplish what I'm looking for, with caveat, but would like to confirm my understanding. If I use just the ruleset with merge queue enabled, and Require review from specific team set up with senior-eng-team for * files, I see that on the PR:

• the 'Merge when ready' button is available for all users
• the PR does still add the senior-eng-team to the list of required reviewers (like how CODEOWNERS does it), therefore making it unclear on the author who to select
• the PR merge box has a message about Merging is blocked:

Is there a way to enforce a review from a senior-eng-team member without adding the team slug to the list of reviewers?

[HalfBlanket]

No, GitHub currently requires the team to appear as reviewers if you enforce a team based review rule. So it cant be hidden

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[Tejas-h-blitz]

The short answer is: no, GitHub doesn't currently support enforcing a team review without surfacing the team as required reviewers on the PR. But here's a workaround that gets close to what you want:
Use CODEOWNERS with a small sub-team instead of the full senior-eng-team.
Create a smaller GitHub team (e.g. senior-eng-reviewers) with rotating members, and add it to your CODEOWNERS file for the relevant paths. This way:

Only that smaller team gets notified, not all 60+ members
You still enforce a required review from a senior engineer
The author sees a specific, manageable group to pick from

For the merge queue concern:
Keep your ruleset with merge queue enabled, and use Require review from specific team pointing to the smaller sub-team. This avoids spamming the full group while still enforcing the review gate.
It's not a perfect solution since the team slug still appears as a required reviewer, but using a small dedicated sub-team minimizes the noise significantly. A native "silent required reviewer" feature would need to be a GitHub product request.