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About issues

Use GitHub Issues to track ideas, feedback, tasks, or bugs for work on GitHub.

About issues

GitHub Issues are items you can create in a repository to plan, discuss and track work.

Issues are simple to create and flexible to suit a variety of scenarios. You can use issues to track work, give or receive feedback, collaborate on ideas or tasks, and efficiently communicate with others.

Integrated with GitHub

Issues let you track your work on GitHub. When you mention an issue in another issue or pull request, the issue's timeline reflects the cross-reference so that you can keep track of related work. To indicate that work is in progress, you can link an issue to a pull request. When the pull request merges, the linked issue automatically closes.

For more information on keywords, see "Linking a pull request to an issue."

Quickly create issues

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, a note in a project, a comment in an issue or pull request, a specific line of code, or 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. For more information, see "Creating an issue."

Track work

You can organize and prioritize issues with projects. To categorize related issues, you can use labels and milestones.

For more information about projects, see "About Projects (beta)." For more information about labels and milestones, see "Using labels and milestones to track work."

Stay 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."

Community management

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

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.

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.