Issue Management: Response & Assignment

Automate the lifecycle of issues requiring author feedback. This GitHub Action closes stale issues, manages author assignments, and transitions labels based on user response.

History

The lineage of this Action began with lee-dohm/no-response, which provided the core logic for closing issues that lacked author feedback. This was later expanded by MBilalShafi/no-response-add-label to include the ability to add a specific label back to an issue once an author provided their response.

This current version refines those features further by integrating automated author assignment, a 15-minute grace period for self-closed issues, and a robust scheduling safety net to ensure no author responses are overlooked.

License

MIT

Features

• Automated Author Assignment:
  Automatically assigns the issue to the original author as soon as the responseRequiredLabel is applied.
• Post-Reopen Unassignment:
  Removes the author as an assignee only after the issue has been successfully reopened in response to their feedback.
• Label Transitions:
  Clears the "response required" status and optionally applies a follow-up label (e.g., review required) when the author comments.
• Self-Close Grace Period:
  Implements a 15-minute grace period for issues closed by the author.
  This action will only reopen them if a comment arrives after this window, preventing "thank you" comments from triggering reopens.
• Scheduled Safety Net:
  In addition to event-based triggers, a scheduled run scans for missed responses, ensuring that even if a webhook is dropped, author replies are eventually processed.
• Configurable Batching:
  Includes a maxIssuesPerRun setting to prevent hitting secondary rate limits when managing repositories with high issue volume.

Note

This fork also makes use of GitHub's immutable releases, so pinning by commit hash is not required.

Getting Started

To begin using this Action, create a workflow file (e.g., .github/workflows/no-response.yml) with the following configuration. This minimal setup handles the hourly sweep and event-based response triggers.

name: No Response

on:
  issues:
    types: [closed, labeled]
  issue_comment:
    types: [created]
  schedule:
    # Schedule for five minutes after the hour, every hour
    - cron: '5 * * * *'

jobs:
  noResponse:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      # Required for labels and assignees
      issues: write
    steps:
      - uses: tcely/no-response@v0.2.0
        with:
          token: ${{ github.token }}

Advanced Configuration

For more control, you can customize the timing, labels, and closing messages:

name: No Response

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  issues:
    types: [closed, labeled]
  issue_comment:
    types: [created]
  schedule:
    # Schedule for thirty-five minutes after the hour, every hour
    - cron: '35 * * * *'

jobs:
  noResponse:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      # Required for labels and assignees
      issues: write
    steps:
      - uses: tcely/no-response@v0.2.0
        with:
          token: ${{ github.token }}
          daysUntilClose: 7
          responseRequiredLabel: 'waiting for author'
          optionalFollowUpLabel: 'review required'
          maxIssuesPerRun: 100
          # Optional custom close comment
          closeComment: >
            This issue was closed due to lack of response. Please respond if you
            have the requested info!

Inputs

See action.yml for full defaults.

Input	Description	Default
token	GitHub token for API access.	${{ github.token }}
daysUntilClose	Days to wait before closing an inactive issue.	14
responseRequiredLabel	Label indicating a response is needed.	more-information-needed
responseRequiredColor	Hex color for the response label.	ffffff
optionalFollowUpLabel	Label to add after the author responds.	undefined
optionalFollowUpLabelColor	Hex color for the follow-up label.	ffffff
maxIssuesPerRun	Maximum number of issues to close per scheduled run.	50
closeComment	Optional comment on close. Set to false to disable.	(Standard message)1

Disabling Automated Comments

If you want the action to close issues silently without posting a comment, set the closeComment input explicitly to the string 'false'.

Caution

The single quotes around 'false' are mandatory.

Without them, the GitHub Actions YAML parser will interpret the value as a boolean instead of the literal string required by the configuration logic.

    steps:
      - uses: tcely/no-response@v0.2.0
        with:
          token: ${{ github.token }}
          closeComment: 'false'

Action flow

Scheduled

When manually triggered or using a scheduled trigger, this action performs these operations:

1. Reopening Missed Responses:
   Scans for closed issues still carrying the responseRequiredLabel where the author responded after closure.
   This serves as a safety net for any issue_comment triggers missed due to GitHub outages or concurrent event failures.
2. Closing Stale Issues:
   Searches for open issues with the responseRequiredLabel that were labeled more than daysUntilClose ago.
   Unless explicitly disabled via closeComment: 'false', the action posts the configured comment before closing the issue.

issues Event

The following actions are processed for issues events:

1. Labeled:
   When the responseRequiredLabel is added, this action automatically assigns the issue to its author.
2. Closed:
   If the original author closes the issue, this action removes both workflow labels to keep the state clean.

issue_comment Event

If the original author comments on an issue marked with responseRequiredLabel these steps are taken by this action:

1. Reopens the issue (if it was closed by someone other than the author).
2. Removes responseRequiredLabel.
3. Unassigns the author (Triggered specifically after the successful reopen transition and label removal).
4. Optionally, adds optionalFollowUpLabel (if configured).

Note

If the author previously closed the issue themselves, it will only be reopened if the comment occurs after a 15-minute grace period.

Footnotes

1. Defined in src/config.ts:

   This issue has been automatically closed because there has been no response to our request for more information from the original author. With only the information that is currently in the issue, we don't have enough information to take action. Please reach out if you have or find the answers we need so that we can investigate further.

   ↩