GitHub – How to Undelete Issue Labels

github

I accidentally deleted an issues label in GitHub that was labelling several hundred issues. Is there a way to either undelete the label or at least find out which issues had previously been marked with the label?

What happened was that I couldn't see an assigned issue but I knew there was a filter. I thought "Manage labels" might be a likely thing to try so I pressed it. Having pressed it all the numbers went away so I thought, "hey if I click the checkbox besides the bug label then surely I'll be able to see all the bugs."

Except it wasn't a checkbox, it was a small circle around an x for delete. So now I've unmarked all our bugs.

Any ideas how we can restore those labels without having a day long meeting prioritizing our issues again?

Edit: Looks like we got lucky and everything should either be labelled as bug or enhancement. I'll be spending sometime this weekend poking the github api to create a script to add a bug label to everything that isn't an enhancement. At least that's more fun than sitting in a meeting. Thanks for the lesson even if it could have been very painful.

Best Answer

There is no way to undelete issue labels. Once gone, it's gone.

If you had exported a backup of the issues before removing the label(s) then you might be able to go back and reference that to find out which issues had what labels.

Related Solutions

GitHub – Edit Code Directly Using SSH

Git relies on the fact that SSH allows you to execute commands on a remote server.

If you run a command like git clone tom@github.com:username/repo, what Git is doing behind the scenes is SSHing to github.com, authenticating as the tom user, and then remotely executing git upload-pack username/repo. Now your client can talk to that process on the remote server by simply reading and writing over the SSH connection.

Of course, allowing arbitrary execution of commands is unsafe, so SSH includes the ability to restrict what commands can be executed. In a very simple case, you can restrict execution to git-shell which is included with Git. All this script does is check the command that you’re trying to execute and ensure that it’s one of git upload-pack, git receive-pack, or git upload-archive.

So the syntax is:

ssh git@<route> <command> <arg>

For instance:

$ ssh git@github.com "git-upload-pack username/repo.git"
$ ssh git@github.com "git-receive-pack username/repo.git"

So to answer to your question, you can't edit the code over ssh, but you can upload your changes if you know the right syntax.

Debugging

If you would like to trace which commands are sent to the git server, follow your git command by GIT_TRACE=1 i.e.:

GIT_TRACE=1 git clone git@github.com:username/repo.git

or (Git 2.3.0+):

GIT_SSH_COMMAND="ssh -vv" git clone git@github.com:username/repo.git

Or for the hardcode mode, use strace like:

strace -f -s200 -e execve git clone git@github.com:username/repo.git

Links

Way to have GitHub send commit notifications including the diff

At this time, there is no way to do what you want using just GitHub. As noted in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4211107/how-to-get-email-diffs-for-github-pushes, there is no support within GitHub to send e-mails including diffs. There are two GitHub issues raised asking about this - http://github.com/github/github-services/issues/86 (closed) and http://github.com/github/github-services/issues/149 but although they say this is something they might implement in the future, there is no indication this will happen.

That said, if you are willing to run your own (local or cloud hosted, but with scripting) web or e-mail server with git repository, you could build this yourself using GitHub post-receive notifications (http://help.github.com/articles/post-receive-hooks) sent to your web server, or normal (without diffs) e-mail notifications sent to a special address on your e-mail server. The choice between web and e-mail notification would be made depending on where & how you are hosting your server - if you have good connectivity & reliability, web notifications will have lowest latency, but if your web-server is unreachable for any reason, you won't get a notification until the next commit that is made while your web-server is reachable; using e-mail will delay the whole process, but might be preferable if you are hosting this at home, and especially for any machine that is not always on.

In either case, you would have to write a script that takes the (e-mail or web/JSON) notification and pulls the relevant repo(s) from GitHub to a local repository, where you would have to set up Git's internal post-receive hook mechanism to run something like http://github.com/jtek/git-hook-update-notify-email (mentioned in the above stackoverflow article) or if you're willing & able to install & use Pygments (Python code colorizer) perhaps something nicer looking like http://blog.chomperstomp.com/making-git-show-post-receive-e-mails-as-an-html-color-formatted-diff/ (linked to/from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3232270/git-post-receive-email-hook-to-show-an-html-formatted-color-diff/).

It's a bit of scripting work, and requires that you have some hosting infrastructure to run the web or e-mail server, the local-pull script, and then the local post-receive hook to generate the actual e-mail with diffs, but it should be possible to set this up in less than a day.