Automatically remove closed issues after a certain time

[azenMatt]

I've set up my project board to track a backlog of work, and have a separate view for a current work cycle / sprint. Over time I end up with a lot of closed issues that I then have to manually remove.

It would be great if these items were auto-archived or filtered out after a certain amount of time.

[r002]

Hi @azenMatt -- coincidentally, this issue that you posted from two weeks ago is another item in my own project that I just knocked out today. While it'd be neat if GitHub natively supported time-triggered actions that are configurable from the GUI, in the interim, for anyone who's in this same situation, one workaround is spinning up a free GCP instance (or cloud provider of your choice) and scheduling a simple cron job to run at whatever time interval you need to invoke the GitHub apis to do your bidding (clean/archive/re-label issues, etc).

In my scenario, I keep a layer of GitHub analytics in Firestore for my project. (GitHub issue stats like streaks-- the number of days a member consecutively contributes, for example). But every night (12:01a ET), I needed a simple job that would hit up the GitHub API, reconcile/aggregate stats, and write this second-order data to Firestore.

So in a nutshell:

1. Write a simple event-driven function that does whatever GitHub tasks you need:

2. Deploy it as cloud function on your free tier:

3. Schedule a cron job for it:

This is how I keep our study group's GitHub Dashboard updated every night! 😀🎉🥳

[nickhagen]

We use this github action to handle this:
https://github.com/actions/stale

Using this, you can specify a stale period, and then it will automatically close stale issues and insert a last comment indicating that they should review/re-open their issue if they feel it should still be worked on.

I prefer this method as it gives me a lot of control with custom responses and status!

[nickhagen]

oof sorry about that, re-read your issue and i didn't realize the beta didn't drop off close issues! I just realized because I had setup a new project to test this, it setup the closed status as 'Done' and they do not drop off the board ... that does feel bad! Will upvote this request.

[nickhagen]

another possible implementation that i have seen is to allow you to just hide the closed column on Kanban or collapse it to a small column

[szeitlin]

I would love to at least be able to hide closed issues from project boards. I don't want to remove them, necessarily, as it's often useful to have the history there (at least until the project is finished).

[azenMatt]

you could add a saved filter to help with this, -is:closed would work