gatsbyjs / stale

Marks issues and pull requests that have not had recent interaction

Close Stale Issues and PRs

Warns and then closes issues and PRs that have had no activity for a specified amount of time.

Based on actions/stale.

Additional features:

• Multiple exempt labels
• Removes the stale label after activity in the marked issue
• Add a message when closing an issue
• DRY run (only logging, no actions)
• Two outputs (blocks and queue) which can be used for a Slack action or passed to your own action. These outputs list the closed issues after each run

Usage

Arguments

Argument	Example	Required	Description
GITHUB_TOKEN	-	Required	Available via environment variables
DRY_RUN	true	Optional	Default: false. Execute the commands only to the console. No GitHub actions or Slack messages will be run
STALE_ISSUE_MESSAGE	'Marking this issue as stale'	Optional	If left empty, no issues will be marked as stale
CLOSE_MESSSAGE	'Closing as stale'	Optional
STALE_PR_MESSAGE	'Marking this PR as stale'	Optional	If left empty, no PRs will be marked as stale
DAYS_BEFORE_STALE	20	Required	Days before an issue is marked as stale (e.g. 20 days after inactivity)
DAYS_BEFORE_CLOSE	10	Required	Days before an issue is closed (e.g. 30 days after inactivity, so 10 days after DAYS_BEFORE_STALE)
STALE_ISSUE_LABEL	'stale?'	Required	Name of the stale label. Must exist already.
EXEMPT_ISSUE_LABELS	see "Workflow Examples"	Optional	Issues with these labels will stay untouched. Write in YAML syntax to get new line breaks.
STALE_PR_LABEL	'stale?'	Required	Name of the stale label. Must exist already.
EXEMPT_PR_LABELS	see "Workflow Examples"	Required	PRs with these labels will stay untouched. Write in YAML syntax to get new line breaks.
OPERATIONS_PER_RUN	30	Required	The maximum number of operations per run, used to control rate limiting

Workflow Examples

The secret GITHUB_TOKEN is automatically available, however other secrets need to be set in your "Secrets" tab under "Settings".

Basic

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 12 * * *"
name: Run Stale Bot on Issue Comments
jobs:
  build:
    name: stale
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@master
      - name: stale
        uses: gatsbyjs/stale@master
        with:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          DAYS_BEFORE_STALE: 20
          DAYS_BEFORE_CLOSE: 10
          STALE_ISSUE_LABEL: 'stale?'
          STALE_PR_LABEL: 'stale?'
          OPERATIONS_PER_RUN: 30
          STALE_ISSUE_MESSAGE: 'marking this as stale message'
          CLOSE_MESSAGE: 'closing message'
          EXEMPT_ISSUE_LABELS: |
            not stale
            important

Slack

In addition to running the stale bot you can also send a list of closed issues via a bot to a Slack channel. For that the stale action exposes a blocks output which has the correct format of Slack's block kit.

We'd recommend the action Post Slack messages as it uses a Slack bot token (and not e.g. a webhook).

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 12 * * *"
name: Run Stale Bot on Issue Comments
jobs:
  build:
    name: stale
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@master
      - name: stale
        id: stale
        uses: gatsbyjs/stale@master
        with:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          DAYS_BEFORE_STALE: 20
          DAYS_BEFORE_CLOSE: 10
          STALE_ISSUE_MESSAGE: 'marking this as stale'
          CLOSE_MESSAGE: 'closing this issue'
          EXEMPT_ISSUE_LABELS: |
            not stale
            important
      - name: Post slack report
        uses: pullreminders/[email protected]
        env:
          SLACK_BOT_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.SLACK_TOKEN }}
        with:
          args: '{\"channel\": \"${{ secrets.SLACK_STALE_CHANNEL_ID }}\", \"text\": \"\", \"blocks\": ${{ steps.stale.outputs.blocks }} }'

It's important that you give the stale action an id so that you can reference its output via steps.<your-id>.outputs.blocks.

Notes

In order to be able to see the results during DRY_RUN you need to set the secret ACTIONS_STEP_DEBUG to true. You can read more on actions/toolkit documention.

Example of Slack bot output

The bot will post a similar message to your channel (the titles are links to the respective issue):

Hi, this is your friendly Stale Action BOT with the latest closed issues

[3] Issues were closed

1. test 08
2. Test 07
3. test 03