Test the behavior of git locally, without testing GitHub.
> The GitHub API has periodic issues merging/creating PRs. (I use PRs since that is more reliable than keeping a local master up to date via pulling at this point).
You are confidently wrong. Git, including pull requests, was developed years before GitHub ever existed. GitHub borrowed the term from git. Pull requests originally (before GitHub) are requests sent via email that one developer pull changes from another.
https://www.git-scm.com/docs/git-request-pull
The request pull command has been part of git since 2005:
https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/git-request-pull.sh
GitHub launched in 2008.
> and no HTTP API
Also wrong:
https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Smart-HTTP
There is nothing GitHub does with respect to git that you cannot do locally.
I didn't know of the specific "request-pull" subcommand so thanks for that link. Still, both things you link are a bit different from how GitHub implements it, and I'd be very surprised if the HTTP API you link includes an endpoint for triggering the request-pull the way that GitHub has such APIs for their pull request mechanism.
If you meant to say that git can do anything GitHub can and we needn't use GitHub, I agree. I've used git in peer-to-peer fashion before, and especially now that it's Microsoft's, I think twice before opening repositories there. But if your main point was rather that git includes the same functionality as GitHub and that OP could have just tested the regular git instead of doing it on GitHub itself, I still think that's a rather different test target.
