labelr

Manage your GitHub labels efficiently

View project on GitHub

labelr

Manage your GitHub labels efficiently.

With labelr, managing your GitHub labels becomes effortless. labelr will attempt to detect all the information required to apply the labels wherever you need them to be.

Infered values and environment variables

labelr will automatically detect the owner or organization and the repostiory from the directory where you are running the command. It will also look automatically for a file named labels.yml.

The following environment variables are used by labelr:

  • GITHUB_ORGANIZATION
  • GITHUB_REPOSITORY
  • GITHUB_USER
  • GITHUB_TOKEN

Precedence

labelr looks for information in this order:

  1. Infered information from current directory
  2. environment variables
  3. CLI arguments

Existing labels

For existing labels, description and color will be updated to match the content of the labels.yml file.

However, labels cannot be renamed. This is due to the fact that the tool does not keep track of the existing configuration. If the name of a label gets changed, a new label will be created.

labels.yml

The labels.yml file has a simple format:

---
labels:
  - name: "kind/bug"
    color: "#D73A4A"
    description: "Something isn't working"

The top level key labels is used to group the labels together. Each label then becomes an entry under this key.

Each label entry is composed of the following fields:

  • name (required)
  • color (required)
  • description (optional)

For a complete example, have a look at the labels used for this project.

Usage examples

From a .github repository

This is the main and most common use case.

It is common for organizations to store their templates and GitHub configuration files in a .github repository. For instance, here is an example of .github repository from AURA.

The content looks like this:

.
├── ISSUE_TEMPLATE
│   ├── bug_report.md
│   └── feature_request.md
├── labels.yml
└── stale.yml

A git remote -vv provides the following information:

origin	https://github.com/aura-atx/.github (fetch)
origin	https://github.com/aura-atx/.github (push)

From this setup, and unless specified otherwise from the CLI, labelr will use the following information:

  • owner and organization will be aura-atx
  • repository will be .github
  • token will be read from the ${GITHUB_TOKEN} environment variable
  • the new labels will be read from the labels.yml file

Apply the new labels to all the repositories in the organization

labelr apply --org

Remove existing labels and apply the new ones to all the repositories in the organization

labelr apply --sync --org

NOTE: without the --sync option, existing labels are updated and new labels added. Nothing gets removed.

Apply labels to the current repository

labelr apply [--sync]

Apply labels to a specific repository from the same owner or organization

labelr apply [--sync] --repository other-repository

Apply labels from a random directory

You may want to run labelr from anywhere on your system. Not a problem, simply pass all the values to the CLI:

labelr apply [--sync] \
  --owner myself \
  --repository my-repository \
  --token ${OTHER_GITHUB_TOKEN} \
  /tmp/my-label-file.yml