What's the difference in GitHub between "fixing", "resolving" and "closing" an issue?

Question

The GitHub docs mention three keywords you can use from a Pull Request description or commit message to close a ticket:

• "close"
• "resolve"
• "fix"

What are the differences between these three? They all sound very similar to me.

Answer 1

The list you are quoting is not a list of options presented in a menu, it is a list of different ways of saying the same thing.

These are all just keywords which Github recognises when it looks at the description. Different people use different terms, so rather than forcing people to use (and remember) one preferred term, they include multiple possibilities.

The examples below the list use different keywords just for illustration. All the keywords are interchangeable.

Answer 2

There is absolutely no difference in behaviour between these three keywords. The target issue ends up closed as "completed" regardless of which one you use.

Supporting all three keywords (and supporting various different forms of each verb, like "close", "closes", or "closed") simply gives you a bit more freedom about how you write your PR description or commit message, perhaps giving you a better chance of weaving the keyword incantations into your prose in a way that sounds natural.

As a matter of English, the words of course have some differences in meaning; you can only "fix" something that is broken (typically a bug), but can "resolve" something like a feature request, and can "close" an issue without necessarily resolving it at all (as you might do via a PR or commit message if e.g. if you've made a design decision that makes a feature impossible to ever implement). But GitHub does not care about these distinctions; from its perspective, they are all just equivalent keywords to do exactly the same thing.