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Configuring autolinks to reference external resources

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You can add autolinks to external resources like JIRA issues and Zendesk tickets to help streamline your workflow.

Autolinks are available in repositories with GitHub Pro, GitHub Team, GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and GitHub Enterprise Server. For more information, see "GitHub's products."

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 and TICK, since both prefixes would match the string TICKET123a.
  • Target URLs include a <num> variable which supports the following characters: a-z (case-insensitive), 0-9, and -.

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.

  1. On GitHub.com, navigate to the main page of the repository.

  2. Under your repository name, click Settings. Repository settings button

  3. In the "Integrations" section of the sidebar, click Autolink references.

  4. Click Add autolink reference. Button to fill out autolink reference information

  5. Under "Reference prefix", type a short, meaningful prefix you want collaborators to use to generate autolinks for the external resource. Field to type abbreviation for external system

  6. 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. Field to type URL to external system

  7. Click Add autolink reference.