Introduction
GitHub provides built-in collaborative communication tools allowing you to interact closely with your community. This quickstart guide will show you how to pick the right tool for your needs.
You can create and participate in issues, pull requests, GitHub Discussions, and team discussions, depending on the type of conversation you'd like to have.
GitHub Issues
- are useful for discussing specific details of a project such as bug reports, planned improvements and feedback.
- are specific to a repository, and usually have a clear owner.
- are often referred to as GitHub's bug-tracking system.
Pull requests
- allow you to propose specific changes.
- allow you to comment directly on proposed changes suggested by others.
- are specific to a repository.
GitHub Discussions
- are like a forum, and are best used for open-form ideas and discussions where collaboration is important.
- may span many repositories.
- provide a collaborative experience outside the codebase, allowing the brainstorming of ideas, and the creation of a community knowledge base.
- often don’t have a clear owner.
- often do not result in an actionable task.
Team discussions
- can be started on your team's page for conversations that span across projects and don't belong in a specific issue or pull request. Instead of opening an issue in a repository to discuss an idea, you can include the entire team by having a conversation in a team discussion.
- allow you to hold discussions with your team about planning, analysis, design, user research and general project decision making in one place.
Which discussion tool should I use?
Scenarios for issues
- I want to keep track of tasks, enhancements and bugs.
- I want to file a bug report.
- I want to share feedback about a specific feature.
- I want to ask a question about files in the repository.
Issue example
This example illustrates how a GitHub user created an issue in our documentation open source repository to make us aware of a bug, and discuss a fix.
- A user noticed that the blue color of the banner at the top of the page in the Chinese version of the GitHub Docs makes the text in the banner unreadable.
- The user created an issue in the repository, stating the problem and suggesting a fix (which is, use a different background color for the banner).
- A discussion ensues, and eventually, a consensus will be reached about the fix to apply.
- A contributor can then create a pull request with the fix.
Scenarios for pull requests
- I want to fix a typo in a repository.
- I want to make changes to a repository.
- I want to make changes to fix an issue.
- I want to comment on changes suggested by others.
Pull request example
This example illustrates how a GitHub user created a pull request in our documentation open source repository to fix a typo.
In the Conversation tab of the pull request, the author explains why they created the pull request.
The Files changed tab of the pull request shows the imple