GitHub Operations
Manage GitHub repositories with a focus on community health, CI reliability, and contributor experience.
When to Activate
- 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
- Read the issue title, body, and comments
- Check if it duplicates an existing issue (search by keywords)
- Apply appropriate labels via
gh issue edit --add-label - For questions: draft and post a helpful response
- For bugs needing more info: ask for reproduction steps
- For good first issues: add
good-first-issuelabel - For duplicates: comment with link to original, add
duplicatelabel
# 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
- Check CI status:
gh pr checks <number> - Check if mergeable:
gh pr view <number> --json mergeable - Check age and last activity
- Flag PRs >5 days with no review
- For community PRs: ensure they have tests and follow conventions
Stale Policy
- Issues with no activity in 14+ days: add
stalelabel, 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-stalelabel)
# 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:
- Check the workflow run:
gh run view <run-id> --log-failed - Identify the failing step
- Check if it is a flaky test vs real failure
- For real failures: identify the root cause and suggest a fix
- For flaky tests: note the pattern for future investigation
# 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:
- Check all CI is green on main
- Review unreleased changes:
gh pr list --state merged --base main - Generate changelog from PR titles
- Create release:
gh release create
# 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
# 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