Labelling Issues

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 5 min

Questions

• How do you make and assign labels to issues?

Objectives

• Learn how to use labels for GitHub issues.

GitHub Labels

Each new GitHub repository comes with a set of default labels that can be assigned to issues, pull requests, or discussions.

From GitHub’s official documentation:

These labels can be viewed from the Issues and Pull Requests pages.

As you can see, several of these are aimed towards large, open-source communities with many collaborators. This is not always the case in Research Software Engineering, however, so we will need to modify these.

Modifying Labels

Labels can be added, edited, or deleted from the labels page.

Each label has three attributes:

• Label name
• Description
• Color (Hex code)

Label Maker

Navigate to your practice repository’s label page.

• Add a new label for discussion
• Remove the label for good first issue
• Modify the color on the wontfix label to your favorite color

Using Labels

Now that the labels are created, they can be assigned to issues.

Labels can be applied from the main Issues page or within a single issue.

From the main Issues page, simply checkmark the issue, hit the “Label” dropdown, select your preferred label(s), and click outside of the dropdown.

To apply within a single issue, click on the issue to open it. Then you will see the “Labels” option on the right-hand side.

Click on “Labels”. A dropdown will appear in which you can select or deselect your preferred label(s).

Stick the Label

Navigate to your practice repository’s issue page.

• Create a new issue entitled “[YOUR NAME]’s label issue”
• Add the discussion label

Filter by Labels

Another feature of labels within GitHub is the ability to filter issues by them. This is a powerful and useful feature for any project that uses GitHub Issues for tracking, organizing, and prioritizing work.

To filter, navigate to the main Issues page. With no issue selected, click the “Labels” dropdown again. You’ll see that this dropdown now says “Filter by label” rather than “Apply labels.”

Click on a label in the list to filter by it. GitHub will only show issues that have that label applied.

You can select multiple labels or use the hints at the bottom of the “Labels” dropdown to do more advanced filtering, such as exclusion.

Practice Filtering

Navigate to https://github.com/spack/spack and find the issues page.

• Filter by the architecture label
• Filter by both the architecture and architectures labels
• (CHALLENGE) Filter by question but exclude bug

You now understand how to make, change, apply, and filter by labels in GitHub Issues.

Key Points

• Labelling issues can help with organization and filtering.