How to add custom attributes in GitHub issues?

Question

We are trying to use GitHub for issue tracking in one of our projects and while its very simply to use, we aren't sure its powerful enough at the same time to fulfil our needs to organize our issue management since we can't find a way to customize it.

Question: Is it possible to add custom attributes in GitHub for issue tracking, search/sort and export the list of issues with those attributes? For example, we'd like to add and use following attributes:

1. External Issue ID: There is an external list of issues/change requests maintained by a separate group that we need to associate our issues with and need a field to specify the external issue ID.

2. Priority: so that we can easily discuss and prioritize what we want to tackle first

3. Severity: to identify impact on the system
4. Type of Issue: Bug, Change Request, New Requirement
5. Class: Performance, Security, Function, Compliance etc.
6. Source: to track whether issue was reported by a specific customer (which could be in hundreds), end user, internal team, partner etc.
7. Date Opened: I think this is maintained internally by GitHub but not exposed anywhere in the UI
8. Date Closed etc.

We understand some of these can be implemented with labels but there would be too many of them to assign and they do not allow exclusivity (for example you can only specify one priority - high, medium, or low assigning - to an issue)

Any ideas if and how this can be implemented in GitHub?

If not, any recommendations?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Update June 2021: you could use custom fields for those attributes!

New beta features within GitHub Issues, with better ways to plan, track, and manage projects.

Read more on the GitHub Issues page or in the FAQ.
✨ NEW – Project planning for developers

Available in limited public beta

Built like a spreadsheet, project tables give you a live canvas to filter, sort, and group issues and pull requests.

Tailor them to your needs with custom fields and saved views.

Sign up for the beta now.

That includes:

• Extend issues with custom fields with support for text, number, date and single-select types
• Change custom field values right from the issues sidebar
• Filter, sort, and group by any field

Answer 2

As you mentioned already, this so far is only done by using labels, for example the way i do priority is having multiple labels:

Priority: Blocker

Priority: High

....

Yes, unfortunately this feature is not intended to exclusively select one value per category as these are labels.

There is a github issue that proposes a new feature to GitHub so that we can have a Priority attribute in every GitHub issue right here

https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/472

Not sure about all the other custom attributes, but maybe this would be a good start for your idea.