Labelling Issues Prs

Categorizing issues and pull requests by topic, priority or any other criteria using labels.

On GitHub, labels are a way to categorize issues and pull requests (PRs) by topic, priority, or other criteria. Some common labels used are:

  • Bug
  • Duplicate
  • Enhancement
  • Feature request
  • High priority
  • Needs feedback

Why bother

Labels are the closest thing GitHub has to a query language, and automation is where they start paying. A label can drive a workflow, a project view, or a saved search, so a consistent vocabulary is what makes any of that work.

They are also how you answer "what is in flight" without reading everything.

Creating them

On an issue or pull request: Labels → Edit labels. Typing a name that does not exist creates one on the spot.

Conventions that hold up:

  • A status: prefix for workflow states — status: blocked, status: needs-review, status: ready. The colon groups them together in the sidebar, which is what makes them usable as a board.
  • A type: prefix for what the thing is — type: bug, type: feature.
  • Colour by meaning, not by category. Everyone has a different idea of what purple means. Red for blocked and green for done reads at a glance.

Applying them in bulk

Select several issues and press L to apply the same labels to all of them. That is the only practical way to triage a backlog.

Making them do work

A saved search is a query with a URL, so you can bookmark it or use it as a project view:

is:open label:"status: blocked"
is:open no:assignee -label:"status: blocked"

The second is the useful shape: everything open that nobody owns and is not waiting on something. Run it regularly and it is a decent answer to "what needs attention".

Labels can also trigger Actions, which is how status: ready ends up deploying something. See Automations and Kanban Boards.

The trap

Every label nobody filters on is noise, and a repository with sixty of them has no vocabulary at all. Start with three or four, add more only when you find yourself searching for something they would have covered, and delete the ones that have not been applied in a year.

Free Resources

official: