Transfer issues with labels

A GitHub Action to transfer an issue between repositories using labels. Supports transferring issues from private to public repositories.

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About

The goal of this GitHub Action is to facilitate the transfer of issues between repositories of the same organization.

In short, attaching a label transfer:sandbox will transfer an issue from its current repositories to the sandbox repository.

This issue makes it possible to overcome the two major limitations of GitHub UI when it comes to transferring issues between repositories:

• Maintaining issue labels during the transfer
• Transferring from private to public repositories

These operations are possible with this action.

Transferring from Private to Public repositories

Transferring issues from private to public repositories is not supported by GitHub by default (see related post here).

Nevertheless the community has found a way to go around that limitation, process that can be entirely automated.

When allow_private_public_transfer is enabled, and if a request is made to transfer to an issue from a private repository to a public one, a temporary private repository will be automatically created, the issue will be transferred to that repository which will then be made public. The issue is then transferred to its final destination and the temporary repository is deleted.

This manipulation requires your Personal API Token to have the delete_repo scope.

The name of that temporary repository is composed of a stringified date to which a random 5 characters string is appended.

This option is disabled by default.

Usage

name: Transfer issue

on:
  issues:
    types:
      - labeled

jobs:
  transfer:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Transfer issue
        # Replace main by the release of your choice
        uses: fgerthoffert/actions-transfer-issue@main
        with:
          token: YOUR_TOKEN
          create_labels_if_missing: true
          allow_private_public_transfer: true

⚙️ Configuration

Input Parameters

The following input parameters are available:

Parameter	Default	Description	Required
token		A GitHub Personal API Token	true
router_prefix	transfer:	Label prefix to identify where to transfer the issue (for example, "transfer:sandbox")	true
allow_private_public_transfer	false	Allow issues to be transferred from private to public repositories.
allow_private_public_transfer_comment	false	Once the transfer from public to private is successful, add a comment to the issue with the repositories. Warning, this will publicly expose the name of the source repository
create_labels_if_missing	true	Create labels in the destination repository if missing
github_issue_id		When providing a GitHub Issue ID (GraphQL ID) the action will use that ID instead of the one provided in the event payload.	false

Outputs

The following outputs are available:

Name	Description
issue_id	The ID of the migrated issue

How to contribute

• Fork the repository
• npm install
• Rename .env.example into .env
• Update the INPUT_ variables
• Do your changes
• npx local-action . src/main.ts .env
• npm run bundle
• npm test
• PR into this repository, detailing your changes

More details about GitHub TypeScript action are available here