Welcome back to GitHub for Beginners, our series designed to help you navigate GitHub like a pro and get the most out of it! We’re bringing you a double dose by sharing these episodes in video format and adding them to our blog, so you can consume the material in whichever form works better for you!
We’re now entering our third season! In the previous seasons, we focused on a general introduction to all things Git and then spent an entire season talking about Copilot. This season, we’re going back to the basics and exploring the core features of GitHub. Our goal is to help you level up—or dust off—your GitHub skills.
In this episode, we’re going to start with two of GitHub’s most powerful collaboration tools: GitHub Issues and Projects. By the end of this post, you’ll know how to create an issue, how to sync your issues to a GitHub Project board, and how to use GitHub Projects to track your work.
Let’s get into it! Or, watch the full video above!
GitHub Issues and Projects are essential tools for any team that wants to stay organized and collaborate efficiently. Issues help you track tasks, bugs, and ideas, all in a clear shared space—ensuring nothing slips through the cracks. Projects look at the bigger picture, letting you visualize, prioritize, and plan your work, turning individual issues into an actionable workflow that everyone can follow.
By combing issues and projects, you can coordinate work, communicate progress, and ensure that everyone’s aligned toward the same goal.
GitHub Issues are a simple way to capture anything that needs attention in your project, whether that’s a new idea, a bug, or a task. Think of them as the building blocks of what you want to add to or update in your project. They help teams work collaboratively and stay organized, while making sure that every item is addressed.
So how do you create an issue? Here’s a sample repository where you can try this out for yourself by following these steps.
Congratulations! You have just created your first issue! Once an issue is created, anyone on the team can jump in and comment. All they need to do is enter some text in the comment field and then click the Comment button. You can even link issues together by typing # and then the number of the issue in the comment field. GitHub will automatically provide a clickable link to the numbered issue. This is super handy for tracking related work.
And when the work is finished, you can close the issue, letting the entire team know that it’s been addressed.
Projects give you a way to group GitHub Issues together in a visual dashboard that’s perfect for planning, organizing, and tracking work. It’s a tool for breaking big goals down into manageable tasks that you can track all in one place.
Now let’s walk through creating a project board. Here’s a sample repository where you can try this out, or you can do it in your own repository. If you still have the repository open from the walkthrough above, you can skip the first step.
GitHub will now create the project for you and take you to the project view. You’ll see the name of your project at the top of the window. In addition, GitHub automatically created columns for you, but you can customize them however you want.
Notice that underneath your project’s name, there are several tabs. These correspond to different views of the project board. Feel free to click on them to see what the different views look like in your project.
To manage your project board, click the three dots in the top-right corner and select Settings. This opens a new page where you can:
At the top of the window, select the Insights button. On the following page, you’ll be able to view, create, and customize charts. You can change the layout of any of your charts by clicking the Configure button and choosing options from the dropdown menus.
Going back to the main window, you can see a Workflows button next to the Insights button on the top. Select the Workflows button. Now you can see several built-in workflows on the left side of the window that you can use to update the status of items based on certain events. For example, you can automatically set the status to todo when an item is added to your project, close issues when the issue’s status in your project is changed or set the status to Done when an issue is closed.
Going back to the main project view once again, select the Add status update button at the very top. This opens a window where you can add a status report of your project’s health and progress.
Combining issues and projects together is how you’re able to get a complete view of your work. Think of issues as individual tasks, and projects as the dashboard that organizes those tasks. When you link issues to a project board, you can visualize where everything stands at a glance.
Go ahead and open your project board if it isn’t open already. At the bottom of the window, select Add item. You can either create a new issue right here, or you could search for existing ones. Click the plus icon and select Add item from repository. Select the issue or issues that you want to add to this project board. You can use the checkbox at the top of the list to automatically select all items at once if you want to add them all.
Once you’ve selected the issues you want to add, press the Add elected items button at the bottom of the window. Notice how this adds all of the selected issues to your project board as cards. You can select the cards and move them between status columns as work progresses. You can also click on the issue to see the full details of the issue.
And here’s something cool. The issue and your project board are now synchronized. When you change the status of the issue in one, it will automatically be reflected in the other. You can move multiple issues at once, organizing them into columns that match your workflow, and get that satisfying feeling when you finally move them into the “Done” column.
Let’s now simulate a real workflow that you might use in your team project by going through the following steps.
Closes # and then the number connected with the issue in the pull request description. This will automatically connect to the issue and provide a link to it for ease of reference.This workflow keeps everyone aligned without the need for constant status meetings. Everything you need to know is there, both in the issue and on the project board!
Now you know how to use GitHub Issues and Projects to organize your work with GitHub. Start simple with a few issues, build out your project board as you go, and you’ll have a system that scales with your team.
If you want to learn even more about GitHub Issues and GitHub Projects, make sure to check out our documentation.
Happy coding!
Kedasha is a Developer Advocate at GitHub where she enjoys sharing the lessons she's learned with the wider developer community. She finds joy in helping others learn about the tech industry and loves sharing her experience as a software developer. Find her online @itsthatladydev.
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