Better Git Started: An Introduction to the Command Line, GitHub, and Git

You’ve seen when making pull requests that you can add comments or descriptions to help moderators understand what you are doing. This feature is also used as a place for conversation regarding the pull request and the problems is solves or brings up.

But what happens if you want to talk about a problem without a pull request? What if you don’t have the time or experience to edit a repository’s contents but want to let moderators know of a potential bug or feature request? GitHub has something for you!

The issues tab is designed as a place of conversation between developers, users, and other members of the community. It runs like a forum where anyone can create a thread (including the repo’s owner) and anyone can reply or supply advice. Moderators will often tag issues and with a well-designed commit message, can close an issue automatically.

Some issues have a label of “good first issue”. This indicates that the problem mentioned in the issue is not very difficult to fix and with a basic understand of that repo’s files, a beginner could fix the issue. If you are interested in developing, I would recommend starting with good first issues.

Note that the Issues tab will not appear on forks, only on the authoritative repository.