Skip to main content

Finding Github Issues

Hey! Are you looking for Contributing in Projects on Github but not able to find them easily as per your tech skills then you should try to understand how github searchbar works. It is one of the most helpful tool in Github. Let\'s understand how it engages and helps in finding relevant issues.

On the Home page, you can easily navigate to the Issues tab and you will see something like this:

2

Now, you won\'t find any issues if you haven\'t created any. But if you look at the search bar, you will find the reason why it is empty or why there are only the issues that you have created. You will see that in the search bar there is a filter called author:Username , which filters the issues which are created by you. You definitely don\'t want this as you want to search and find other issues by other people/communities. So, simply remove the text author:Username from the search bar. Keep rest as it is for now. Now if you press enter after removing the author filter, you will see all the issues on GitHub.

3

There will be a ton of them, very random in terms of programming languages, frameworks, projects, difficulty, type, etc. they are basically the issues created recently on GitHub.

Now, the is:open Label is indicating wheather the issue is open or not. It will filter all the open issues available in github so you can easily differentiate between the issues that were closed either because the issue got solved or it was irrelevent.

The is:archieved label is indicating whether the issue consisting repository is archieved or not. If the arguement is false then it simply means the repository is still active otherwise it is considered to be inactive.

We can filter the issues as language:name This will filter the issues which have this language in their codebase.

For Example :

1

Here, I have filtered the issues which have language as Javascript, you can use any language/tool you might want and would love to find some interesting projects to contribute and learn from.

If you want to search by multiple programming languages you can separate the names of those programming languages by a comma ,.

You can also separate programming languages with space and enclosing all of them under double quotes "".

Add labels

You can find issues as per labels marked on them, many issues have a label marked on them to improve their visibility and meta-information about the issue.

We have some labels which GitHub has created already for common scenarios in projects.

  • bug
  • documentation
  • duplicate
  • enhancement
  • good first Issue
  • help wanted
  • invalid
  • question
  • wontfix

We can even create our own labels by providing the label name and a description.

To search for labels, you can use label:name of the label. You can any of the above 9 label tags or any other tag name that you think is popular other than those 9.

You would have to use double quotes ("") to add certain labels with multiple words like good first issue or help wanted.

Now you can go ahead and start applying the filters on issues and make some contributions to Open-Source on GitHub. We covered some methods to find and filter out the issues on GitHub based on the programming languages/tools and the labels attached to them.

This technique can be good for beginners as well as people who want to find quick issues to solve. Feel free to explore and try out different filters and find the issue you are confident to work on. Good Luck! Happy Coding :)