Referencing pull-requests and issues

Estimated time: 10 minutes

Overview

Questions

• How do I reference issues and pull requests?
• How can issues be automatically closed when a pull request is merged?

Objectives

After following this section, participants will be ready to practice the following skills:

• reference issues and pull requests by their number
• implement keywords to trigger automatic closue of issues when fixed by a pull request

• It can be helpful to refer to issues and pull requests in conversations elsewhere in a repository
• Every issue and PR has a unique number (based on the order in which they were created)
• These numbers can be used, preceded by #, to reference a given issue or PR.
• Additionally, PRs (and commit messages) that include particular phrases will trigger the automatic closure of an issue:
  • “closes”
  • “fixes”
  • “resolves”

Example Issues/PRs

If you are using example repositories generated with the accompanying script, Issues 1 & 2 should have pull requests associated with them already, which you can use to highlight this.

Key Points

• Issues and pull requests can be referred to by their number within a repository.
• Pull requests descriptions that include “fixes #XYZ”, “resolves #XYZ”, or “closes #XYZ” will all close issue number XYZ when they are merged.