Introduction
This tutorial demonstrates how to use the actions/stale
action to comment on and close issues that have been inactive for a certain period of time. For example, you can comment if an issue has been inactive for 30 days to prompt participants to take action. Then, if no additional activity occurs after 14 days, you can close the issue.
In the tutorial, you will first make a workflow file that uses the actions/stale
action. Then, you will customize the workflow to suit your needs.
Creating the workflow
-
Choose a repository where you want to apply this project management workflow. You can use an existing repository that you have write access to, or you can create a new repository. For more information about creating a repository, see "Creating a new repository."
-
In your repository, create a file called
.github/workflows/YOUR_WORKFLOW.yml
, replacingYOUR_WORKFLOW
with a name of your choice. This is a workflow file. For more information about creating new files on GitHub, see "Creating new files." -
Copy the following YAML contents into your workflow file.
YAML name: Close inactive issues on: schedule: - cron: "30 1 * * *" jobs: close-issues: runs-on: ubuntu-latest permissions: issues: write pull-requests: write steps: - uses: actions/stale@v5 with: days-before-issue-stale: 30 days-before-issue-close: 14 stale-issue-label: "stale" stale-issue-message: "This issue is stale because it has been open for 30 days with no activity." close-issue-message: "This issue was closed because it has been inactive for 14 days since being marked as stale." days-before-pr-stale: -1 days-before-pr-close: -1 repo-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
name: Close inactive issues on: schedule: - cron: "30 1 * * *" jobs: close-issues: runs-on: ubuntu-latest permissions: issues: write pull-requests: write steps: - uses: actions/stale@v5 with: days-before-issue-stale: 30 days-before-issue-close: 14 stale-issue-label: "stale" stale-issue-message: "This issue is stale because it has been open for 30 days with no activity." close-issue-message: "This issue was closed because it has been inactive for 14 days since being marked as stale." days-before-pr-stale: -1 days-before-pr-close: -1 repo-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
-
Customize the parameters in your workflow file:
- Change the value for
on.schedule
to dictate when you want this workflow to run. In the example above, the workflow will run every day at 1:30 UTC. For more information about scheduled workflows, see Events that trigger workflows. - Change the value for
days-before-issue-stale
to the number of days without activity before theactions/stale
action labels an issue. If you never want this action to label issues, set this value to-1
. - Change the value for
days-before-issue-close
to the number of days without activity before theactions/stale
action closes an issue. If you never want this action to close issues, set this value to-1
. - Change the value for
stale-issue-label
to the label that you want to apply to issues that have been inactive for the amount of time specified bydays-before-issue-stale
. - Change the value for
stale-issue-message
to the comment that you want to add to issues that are labeled by theactions/stale
action. - Change the value for
close-issue-message
to the comment that you want to add to issues that are closed by theactions/stale
action.
- Change the value for
-
Commit your workflow file to the default branch of your repository. For more information, see "Creating new files."
Expected results
Based on the schedule
parameter (for example, every day at 1:30 UTC), your workflow will find issues that have been inactive for the specified period of time and will add the specified comment and label. Additionally, your workflow will close any previously labeled issues if no additional activity has occurred for the specified period of time.
Note
The schedule
event can be delayed during periods of high loads of GitHub Actions workflow runs. High load times include the start of every hour. If the load is sufficiently high enough, some queued jobs may be dropped. To decrease the chance of delay, schedule your workflow to run at a different time of the hour.
You can view the history of your workflow runs to see this workflow run periodically. For more information, see Viewing workflow run history.
This workflow will only label and/or close 30 issues at a time in order to avoid exceeding a rate limit. You can configure this with the operations-per-run
setting. For more information, see the actions/stale
action documentation.
Next steps
- To learn more about additional things you can do with the
actions/stale
action, like closing inactive pull requests, ignoring issues with certain labels or milestones, or only checking issues with certain labels, see theactions/stale
action documentation. - Search GitHub for examples of workflows using this action.