Issues

The GitLab Issue Tracker is an advanced and complete tool for tracking the evolution of a new idea or the process of solving a problem.

It allows you, your team, and your collaborators to share and discuss proposals before and while implementing them.

GitLab Issues and the GitLab Issue Tracker are available in all GitLab Products as part of the GitLab Workflow.

Use cases

Issues can have endless applications. Just to exemplify, these are some cases for which creating issues are most used:

Discussing the implementation of a new idea
Submitting feature proposals
Asking questions
Reporting bugs and malfunction
Obtaining support
Elaborating new code implementations

See also the blog post "Always start a discussion with an issue".

Keep private things private

For instance, let's assume you have a public project but want to start a discussion on something you don't want to be public. With Confidential Issues, you can discuss private matters among the project members, and still keep your project public, open to collaboration.

Streamline collaboration

With Multiple Assignees for Issues, available in GitLab Starter you can streamline collaboration and allow shared responsibilities to be clearly displayed. All assignees are shown across your workflows and receive notifications (as they would as single assignees), simplifying communication and ownership.

Consistent collaboration

Create issue templates to make collaboration consistent and containing all information you need. For example, you can create a template for feature proposals and another one for bug reports.

Issue Tracker

The Issue Tracker is the collection of opened and closed issues created in a project. It is available for all projects, from the moment the project is created.

Find the issue tracker by navigating to your Project's homepage > Issues.

Issues per project

When you access your project's issues, GitLab will present them in a list, and you can use the tabs available to quickly filter by open and closed issues.

You can also search and filter the results more deeply with GitLab's search capacities.

Issues per group

View issues in all projects in the group, including all projects of all descendant subgroups of the group. Navigate to Group > Issues to view these issues. This view also has the open and closed issues tabs.

GitLab Issues Functionalities

The image bellow illustrates how an issue looks like:

Learn more about it on the GitLab Issues Functionalities documentation.

New issue

Read through the documentation on creating issues.

Closing issues

Learn distinct ways to close issues in GitLab.

Moving issues

Read through the documentation on moving issues.

Deleting issues

Read through the documentation on deleting issues

Create a merge request from an issue

Learn more about it on the GitLab Issues Functionalities documentation.

Search for an issue

Learn how to find an issue by searching for and filtering them.

Advanced features

Confidential Issues

Whenever you want to keep the discussion presented in a issue within your team only, you can make that issue confidential. Even if your project is public, that issue will be preserved. The browser will respond with a 404 error whenever someone who is not a project member with at least Reporter level tries to access that issue's URL.

Learn more about them on the confidential issues documentation.

Issue templates

Create templates for every new issue. They will be available from the dropdown menu Choose a template when you create a new issue:

Learn more about them on the issue templates documentation.

Crosslinking issues

Learn more about crosslinking issues and merge requests.

Issue Board

The GitLab Issue Board is a way to enhance your workflow by organizing and prioritizing issues in GitLab.

Find GitLab Issue Boards by navigating to your Project's Dashboard > Issues > Board.

Read through the documentation for Issue Boards to find out more about this feature.

With GitLab Starter, you can also create various boards per project with Multiple Issue Boards.

Import Issues from CSV

You can import a CSV file containing issue titles and descriptions to create a batch of issues simultaneously.

When you navigate to the Issues list page, an import button is displayed.

For further details, see Importing issues from CSV

External Issue Tracker

Alternatively to GitLab's built-in Issue Tracker, you can also use an external tracker such as Jira, Redmine, YouTrack, or Bugzilla.