GitHub API - Issue Deletion

[0xAndrewBlack]

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Hello, I'm using the GitHub API to create issues for me in my app which is a basic issue tracker to keep organized in a different way but still relying on the GitHub Issues and Project Kanbans too.

I discovered a long time ago that I can't archive or delete issues via the Rest API nor with the GrahQL API, will be any way to delete or archive issues somehow? (I see posts going back with years even ten years to add this) 👀

This post is kind of a feature request too to add Issue Deletion through the Rest API.

[norwd]

The easiest way would be to use GitHub's gh cli tool, see https://cli.github.com/manual/gh_issue_delete 👍

[0xAndrewBlack]

I see thanks, are there any npm packages that wraps around it? It would be useful for my app development.

[norwd]

I see thanks, are there any npm packages that wraps around it? It would be useful for my app development.

There doesn't seem to be an existing nom package, but I did look at the source code for the gh issue delete command to see how it works and it would be easy enough to call the end point in JS with http. Have a look here:

https://github.com/cli/cli/blob/3c0c450e7c141f61f56aab28ddbaf38a6a07c12d/pkg/cmd/issue/delete/delete.go#L111-L128

It turns out that there is an endpoint for deleting issues, it just uses the GitHub graphql api, not their rest api. I haven't used the graphql api very much but my understanding is that a POST request with the following body would do the trick:

mutation {
  deleteIssue(input: { issueID: issueID }) {
    repository struct {
      id
    }
  }
}

Again this is untested but have a read through the docs for the deleteIssue mutation just in case 👍

[PavanLuca]

The easiest way would be to use GitHub's gh cli tool, see https://cli.github.com/manual/gh_issue_delete 👍

Can you show me an example? I think I'm not entering it correctly. Then I never saw this CLI here, I never needed to use additional tools so far.

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[0xAndrewBlack]

The easiest way to delete an issue via the GitHub API is with theirs GraphGL API

axios({
	method: 'POST',
		url: 'https://api.github.com/graphql',
		headers: {
			Authorization: `bearer ${config.GH_TOKEN}`,
		        'Content-Type': 'application/json',
		},
		data: {
			query: `
				mutation {
					deleteIssue(input: {issueId: "${issue.node_id}" }) {
						repository {
							id
						}
					}
				}
			`,
		},
	});
});

[PavanLuca]

You might be interested in my discussion 👉 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/128602.