I was reading on pending pacts and how to use with Pact JVM. The system properties mention that besides setting pactbroker.enablePending = true you also have to provide pactbroker.providerBranch or pactbroker.providerTags. Why is that? The language agnostic doc does not mention anything about that.

Those are the requirements from the Pact Broker. You must understand that Pact-JVM doesn't do much in this regard. It just sends what you configure to the Broker and then gets a list of Pacts back.

The reason is that a “pending” pact is a relative condition. A pact may be pending for one branch, but not for another

@Matt (pactflow.io / pact-js / pact-go) In the case of a provider PR, the

pactbroker.providerBranch

would be the

<PR_BRANCH_NAME>

, and after merging into the main branch, the

pactbroker.providerBranch

would be

main

. Is that correct? Apologies for the explicit question - in our organization, there was some confusion because even PRs ( which have pending pacts enabled) have

pactbroker.providerBranch

always set to

main

Yes that’s correct. You want to keep the broker informed of the branch info so we can track which branch is compatible with various consumer