About autolinks
Anyone with admin permissions to a repository can configure autolink references to link issues, pull requests, commit messages, and release descriptions to external third-party services.
Autolink references can now accept alphanumeric characters. When originally introduced, custom autolinks were limited to external resources that used numeric identifiers. Custom autolinks now work with alphanumeric identifiers. Legacy autolink references that recognize only numeric identifiers are deprecated and displayed with a "legacy" label.
You define custom autolinks by specifying a reference prefix and a target URL.
- Reference prefixes cannot have overlapping names. For example, a repository cannot have two custom autolinks with prefixes such as
TICKET
andTICK
, since both prefixes would match the stringTICKET123a
. - Target URLs include a
<num>
variable which supports the following characters:a-z
(case-insensitive),0-9
, and-
.
Configuring autolinks to reference external resources
This procedure demonstrates how to configure autolinks to reference external resources. For example, if you use Zendesk to track user-reported tickets, you can reference a ticket number in the pull request you opened to fix the issue.
-
On GitHub.com, navigate to the main page of the repository.
-
Under your repository name, click Settings.
-
In the "Integrations" section of the sidebar, click Autolink references.
-
Click Add autolink reference.
-
Under "Reference prefix", type a short, meaningful prefix you want collaborators to use to generate autolinks for the external resource.
-
Under "Target URL", type the link to the external system you want to link to. Make sure to keep
<num>
as a variable for the reference number. -
Click Add autolink reference.