About issues

You can create issues in your repository to plan, discuss, and track work. Issues are quick to create, flexible, and can be used in many ways. Issues can track bug reports, new features and ideas, and anything else you need to write down or discuss with your team. You can also break your work down further by adding sub-issues and easily browse the full hierarchy of work to be done.

Issues can be created in a variety of ways, so you can choose the most convenient method for your workflow. For example, you can create an issue from a repository, while adding sub-issues, convert a comment in an issue or pull request, create an issue from a specific line of code, or via a URL query. You can also create an issue from your platform of choice: through the web UI, GitHub Desktop, GitHub CLI, GraphQL and REST APIs, or GitHub Mobile. See "Creating an issue."

About sub-issues

You can add sub-issues to an issue to quickly break down larger pieces of work into tasks. Sub-issues add support for hierarchies of issues on GitHub by creating relationships between your issues. You can create multiple levels of sub-issues that accurately represent your project by breaking down tasks into exactly the amount of detail that you and your team require. See "Adding sub-issues" and "Browsing sub-issues."

About integration with GitHub

Issues integrate with your work all across GitHub. Mentioning an issue in another issue or pull request will create references between them and using keywords, like fixes:, in your pull requests will automatically close the associated issues. See "Linking a pull request to an issue."

Projects is strongly integrated with issues. All your issue metadata is available in your projects, allowing you to create views and filters to represent your work. See "About Projects."

Staying up to date

To stay updated on the most recent comments in an issue, you can subscribe to an issue to receive notifications about the latest comments. To quickly find links to recently updated issues you're subscribed to, visit your dashboard. For more information, see "About notifications" and "About your personal dashboard."

You can assign yourself and teammates to issues to make it clear who is working on an issue and also make it easier for you to locate your issues. See "Assigning issues and pull requests to other GitHub users" and "Viewing all of your issues and pull requests."

Community management

To help contributors open meaningful issues that provide the information that you need, you can use issue forms and issue templates. See "Using templates to encourage useful issues and pull requests."

To maintain a healthy community, you can report comments that violate GitHub's Community Guidelines. See "Reporting abuse or spam."

Efficient communication

You can @mention collaborators who have access to your repository in an issue to draw their attention to a comment. To link related issues in the same repository, you can type # followed by part of the issue title and then clicking the issue that you want to link. To communicate responsibility, you can assign issues. If you find yourself frequently typing the same comment, you can use saved replies. See "Basic writing and formatting syntax" and "Assigning issues and pull requests to other GitHub users."

Comparing issues and discussions

Some conversations are more suitable for GitHub Discussions. You can use GitHub Discussions to ask and answer questions, share information, make announcements, and conduct or participate in conversations about a project. For more information, see "About discussions." For guidance on when to use an issue or a discussion, see "Communicating on GitHub."

When a conversation in an issue is better suited for a discussion, you can convert the issue to a discussion.