GitHub Operations

Manage GitHub repositories with a focus on community health, CI reliability, and contributor experience.

When to Use

• Triaging issues (classifying, labeling, responding, deduplicating)
• Managing PRs (review status, CI checks, stale PRs, merge readiness)
• Debugging CI/CD failures
• Preparing releases and changelogs
• Monitoring Dependabot and security alerts
• Managing contributor experience on open-source projects
• User says "check GitHub", "triage issues", "review PRs", "merge", "release", "CI is broken"

Tool Requirements

• gh CLI for all GitHub API operations
• Repository access configured via gh auth login

Issue Triage

Classify each issue by type and priority:

Types: bug, feature-request, question, documentation, enhancement, duplicate, invalid, good-first-issue

Priority: critical (breaking/security), high (significant impact), medium (nice to have), low (cosmetic)

Triage Workflow

1. Read the issue title, body, and comments
2. Check if it duplicates an existing issue (search by keywords)
3. Apply appropriate labels via gh issue edit --add-label
4. For questions: draft and post a helpful response
5. For bugs needing more info: ask for reproduction steps
6. For good first issues: add good-first-issue label
7. For duplicates: comment with link to original, add duplicate label

bash
# Search for potential duplicates
gh issue list --search "keyword" --state all --limit 20

# Add labels
gh issue edit <number> --add-label "bug,high-priority"

# Comment on issue
gh issue comment <number> --body "Thanks for reporting. Could you share reproduction steps?"

PR Management

Review Checklist

1. Check CI status: gh pr checks <number>
2. Check if mergeable: gh pr view <number> --json mergeable
3. Check age and last activity
4. Flag PRs >5 days with no review
5. For community PRs: ensure they have tests and follow conventions

Stale Policy

• Issues with no activity in 14+ days: add stale label, comment asking for update
• PRs with no activity in 7+ days: comment asking if still active
• Auto-close stale issues after 30 days with no response (add closed-stale label)

bash
# Find stale issues (no activity in 14+ days)
gh issue list --label "stale" --state open

# Find PRs with no recent activity
gh pr list --json number,title,updatedAt --jq '.[] | select(.updatedAt < "2026-03-01")'

CI/CD Operations

When CI fails:

1. Check the workflow run: gh run view <run-id> --log-failed
2. Identify the failing step
3. Check if it is a flaky test vs real failure
4. For real failures: identify the root cause and suggest a fix
5. For flaky tests: note the pattern for future investigation

bash
# List recent failed runs
gh run list --status failure --limit 10

# View failed run logs
gh run view <run-id> --log-failed

# Re-run a failed workflow
gh run rerun <run-id> --failed

Release Management

When preparing a release:

1. Check all CI is green on main
2. Review unreleased changes: gh pr list --state merged --base main
3. Generate changelog from PR titles
4. Create release: gh release create

bash
# List merged PRs since last release
gh pr list --state merged --base main --search "merged:>2026-03-01"

# Create a release
gh release create v1.2.0 --title "v1.2.0" --generate-notes

# Create a pre-release
gh release create v1.3.0-rc1 --prerelease --title "v1.3.0 Release Candidate 1"

Security Monitoring

bash
# Check Dependabot alerts
gh api repos/{owner}/{repo}/dependabot/alerts --jq '.[].security_advisory.summary'

# Check secret scanning alerts
gh api repos/{owner}/{repo}/secret-scanning/alerts --jq '.[].state'

# Review and auto-merge safe dependency bumps
gh pr list --label "dependencies" --json number,title

• Review and auto-merge safe dependency bumps
• Flag any critical/high severity alerts immediately
• Check for new Dependabot alerts weekly at minimum

Quality Gate

Before completing any GitHub operations task:

• all issues triaged have appropriate labels
• no PRs older than 7 days without a review or comment
• CI failures have been investigated (not just re-run)
• releases include accurate changelogs
• security alerts are acknowledged and tracked