GitHub issues

1. GitHub issues

Great job cloning and forking! Another part of collaborating on GitHub is communicating through issues, which we'll review now.

2. What is an issue?

GitHub issues are messages to track problem fixes, plans, important tasks, and communications for a project.

3. Issues

They live under the Issues tab, where we can see all of our issues for that repo in one place.

4. Create a new issue

There are a few ways to create a new issue. We will focus on creating one from a repo. To create a new issue, we click on the Issues tab. Here we can see all of the issues related to this specific repo. We don't have any at the moment. We click the New issue button on the right to create a new one.

5. Create a new issue

We can now give our issue a title and add the details.

6. Create a new issue

The issue is in markdown format, so we can enhance it with some syntax we previously learned. Recall that we can view our markdown formatting in the Preview tab.

7. Create a new issue

Finally, we click Submit new issue.

8. Assign an issue

There's one problem, though. This is a collaborative project, and we want this issue to reach George. Right now, George may not see this issue because we haven't assigned or tagged him.

9. Assign an issue

To assign this issue to George, navigate to the Assignees section on the right and click on the gear icon. Here we see all of the people that have access to this repo.

10. Assign an issue

We assign George to notify him of the issue and its tasks.

11. Tagging

We can tag him within the issue using the at symbol and his GitHub handle.

12. Assign vs. Tag

Assigning a user clarifies who should be working on the issue, while tagging a user is more of a communication tool to ensure the right people read the message.

13. Comment on an issue

Fantastic! We have created and assigned an issue! We can continue communicating on the same issue using the comment feature. There is a comment box below an open issue where we can add more text using markdown and hit the green comment button.

14. Link to another issue

It's possible that sometimes issues can be related. GitHub makes it easy to link to another issue of a repo. We have to type a single hashtag, and GitHub will show us the other issues in this repo. This issue is a review of the Spring campaign, and we want to refer back to some updates made to the Winter Campaign.

15. Link to another issue

We click on the one we want, creating a link to that issue!

16. Quote a previous comment

Another cool trick is to quote a previous comment. Perhaps a user has sent several comments, but we only have the answer to one of them right now. We navigate to that comment, click on the three dots in the top right, and select Quote reply.

17. Quote a previous comment

This converts that comment into a quote in a new comment, where we can add our reply. As we can see, the syntax to add a quote is a right chevron.

18. Close an issue

Finally, once everything in the issue has been addressed, we can close the issue. This is done by hitting the Close with comment button. The default is to close as completed, indicating that items in this issue were successfully addressed. The other option is to close as not planned, indicating that a fix was not possible, for example.

19. Close an issue

It is accessible via the dropdown arrow.

20. Close an issue

Here is the closed view.

21. Let's practice!

Let's have a go at communicating through GitHub issues with some exercises.

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