GitHub is a collaborative platform

8 minutes

Collaboration is at the core of everything GitHub does. We went over repositories in the first unit of the module and learned that repositories help you organize your project and its files. In the last unit, we learned about pull requests, which is a way to keep track of changes made to your project.

In this unit, we're learning about issues and discussions. These are two other pieces that contribute to the collaborative nature of the GitHub Enterprise Platform.

Issues

GitHub Issues were created to track ideas, feedback, tasks, or bugs for work on GitHub. Issues can be created in various ways, so you can choose the most convenient method for your workflow.

For this walkthrough, we'll go over how to create an issue from a repository. But issues can also be created from:

An item in a task list.
A note in a project.
A comment in an issue or pull request.
A specific line of code.
A URL query.

Creating an issue from a repository

On GitHub.com, navigate to the main page of the repository.
Under your repository name, select Issues.
Select New issue.
If your repository uses issue templates, next to the type of issue you'd like to open select Get started.

If the type of issue you'd like to open isn't included in the available options, select Open a blank issue. If not using templates, skip to Step 5.
In the Add a title field, enter a title for your issue.
In the Add a description field, type a description of your issue.
If you're a project maintainer, you can assign the issue to someone, add it to a project board, associate it with a milestone, or apply a label.
When you're finished, select Submit new issue.

Some conversations are more suitable for GitHub Discussions. You can use GitHub Discussions to ask and answer questions, share information, make announcements, and conduct or participate in conversations about a project.

In the next section, we’ll review Discussions and how to best utilize the feature.

Discussions

Discussions are for conversations that need to be accessible to everyone and aren't related to code. Discussions enable fluid, open conversation in a public forum.

In this section we go over:

Enabling a discussion in your repository.
Creating a new discussion and various discussion categories.

Let’s dive into enabling a discussion in your repository.

Enabling a discussion in your repository

Repository owners and people with Write access can enable GitHub Discussions for a community on their public and private repositories. The visibility of a discussion is inherited from the repository the discussion is created in.

When you first enable GitHub Discussions, you're invited to configure a welcome post.

On GitHub.com, navigate to the main page of the repository.
Under your repository name, select Settings.
Scroll down to the Features section and under Discussions, select Setup discussions.
Under Start a new discussion, edit the template to align with the resources and tone you want to set for your community.
Select Start discussion.

You're now ready to create a new discussion.

Create a new discussion

Any authenticated user who can view the repository can create a discussion in that repository. Similarly, since organization discussions are based on a source repository, any authenticated user who can view the source repository can create a discussion in that organization.

On GitHub.com, navigate to the main page of the repository or organization where you want to start a discussion.
Under your repository or organization name, select Discussions.
On the right side of the page, select New discussion.
Select a discussion category by selecting Get started. All discussions must be created in a category. For repository discussions, people with maintain or admin permissions to the repository define the categories for discussions in that repository.

Each category must have a unique name, emoji pairing, and a detailed description stating its purpose. Categories help maintainers organize how conversations are filed. They're customizable to help distinguish categories that are Q&A or more open-ended conversations. The following table shows the default categories for discussions and their purpose.

Category	Purpose	Format
📣 Announcements	Updates and news from project maintainers	Announcement
#️⃣ General	Anything and everything relevant to the project	Open-ended discussion
💡 Ideas	Ideas to change or improve the project	Open-ended discussion
🗳️ Polls	Polls with multiple options for the community to vote for and discuss	Polls
🙏 Q&A	Questions for the community to answer, with a question/answer format	Question and Answer
🙌 Show and tell	Creations, experiments, or tests relevant to the project	Open-ended discussion

Under Discussion title enter a title for your discussion, and under Write enter the body of your discussion.
Select Start discussion.