Create GitHub Pull Request and Issue Templates

By  on  

There's nothing more frustrating than getting an incomplete bug report.  I've often seen bug reports containing a useless "{x} feature doesn't work"; no steps to reproduce, no URL, no browser or device information, just a hopelessly vague message.  Similar is receiving a pull request or patch which doesn't state its intent and doesn't provide steps to test (and what about unit tests?).  Now that many projects are public, most on GitHub, I've seen a massive rise in these types of sparsely documented issues and pull requests.

I recently found out you an create pull request and issues templates so that when the user goes to file a pull request or issue, your template displays within the description textarea.  Let's have a look at how we can do that!

Creating Template Files

Creating and putting in place the template files is easy:

  • The proper place to put the template files is in a .github directory at the root of your repository
  • The templates are to be created in markdown format
  • The issues template text goes in a ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md file
  • The pull requests template text goes in a PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md file

A great example of template usage can be seen in the A-Frame repository.  The issue template looks as follows:

**Description:**

- A-Frame Version:
- Platform / Device:
- Reproducible Code Snippet or URL:

<!-- If you have a support question, please ask at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask/?tags=aframe rather than filing an issue. -->

If your community repositories suffer from lack of information in issues and pull requests, or you simply want to prevent the problem, create GitHub templates for developers.  They may not provide the information you'd like, but you can at least nudge them in the proper direction!

Recent Features

  • By
    How to Create a RetroPie on Raspberry Pi &#8211; Graphical Guide

    Today we get to play amazing games on our super powered game consoles, PCs, VR headsets, and even mobile devices.  While I enjoy playing new games these days, I do long for the retro gaming systems I had when I was a kid: the original Nintendo...

  • By
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Photo Stack Effect with Pure CSS Animations or MooTools

    My favorite technological piece of Google Plus is its image upload and display handling.  You can drag the images from your OS right into a browser's DIV element, the images upload right before your eyes, and the albums page displays a sexy photo deck animation...

  • By
    MooTools FontChecker Plugin

    There's a very interesting piece of code on Google Code called FontAvailable which does a jQuery-based JavaScript check on a string to check whether or not your system has a specific font based upon its output width. I've ported this functionality to MooTools. The MooTools...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!