Search issues and pull requests

Find issues by state and keyword. This method returns up to 100 results per page.

When searching for issues, you can get text match metadata for the issue title, issue body, and issue comment body fields when you pass the text-match media type. For more details about how to receive highlighted search results, see Text match metadata.

GET /search/issues

Parameters

Name Type Description
q string Required. The query contains one or more search keywords and qualifiers. Qualifiers allow you to limit your search to specific areas of GitHub. The REST API supports the same qualifiers as GitHub.com. To learn more about the format of the query, see Constructing a search query. See "Searching issues and pull requests" for a detailed list of qualifiers.
sort string Sorts the results of your query by the number of comments, reactions, reactions-+1, reactions--1, reactions-smile, reactions-thinking_face, reactions-heart, reactions-tada, or interactions. You can also sort results by how recently the items were created or updated, Default: best match
order string Determines whether the first search result returned is the highest number of matches (desc) or lowest number of matches (asc). This parameter is ignored unless you provide sort. Default: desc

Example

Let's say you want to find the oldest unresolved Python bugs on Windows. Your query might look something like this.

curl http(s)://[hostname]/api/v3/search/issues?q=windows+label:bug+language:python+state:open&sort=created&order=asc

In this query, we're searching for the keyword windows, within any open issue that's labeled as bug. The search runs across repositories whose primary language is Python. We’re sorting by creation date in ascending order, so that the oldest issues appear first in the search results.

Status: 200 OK
Link: <https://api.github.com/resource?page=2>; rel="next",
      <https://api.github.com/resource?page=5>; rel="last"
X-RateLimit-Limit: 20
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 19

{
  "total_count": 280,
  "incomplete_results": false,
  "items": [
    {
      "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/batterseapower/pinyin-toolkit/issues/132",
      "repository_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/batterseapower/pinyin-toolkit",
      "labels_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/batterseapower/pinyin-toolkit/issues/132/labels{/name}",
      "comments_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/batterseapower/pinyin-toolkit/issues/132/comments",
      "events_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/batterseapower/pinyin-toolkit/issues/132/events",
      "html_url": "https://github.com/batterseapower/pinyin-toolkit/issues/132",
      "id": 35802,
      "node_id": "MDU6SXNzdWUzNTgwMg==",
      "number": 132,
      "title": "Line Number Indexes Beyond 20 Not Displayed",
      "user": {
        "login": "Nick3C",
        "id": 90254,
        "node_id": "MDQ6VXNlcjkwMjU0",
        "avatar_url": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/934442aadfe3b2f4630510de416c5718?d=https://a248.e.akamai.net/assets.github.com%2Fimages%2Fgravatars%2Fgravatar-user-420.png",
        "gravatar_id": "",
        "url": "https://api.github.com/users/Nick3C",
        "html_url": "https://github.com/Nick3C",
        "followers_url": "https://api.github.com/users/Nick3C/followers",
        "following_url": "https://api.github.com/users/Nick3C/following{/other_user}",
        "gists_url": "https://api.github.com/users/Nick3C/gists{/gist_id}",
        "starred_url": "https://api.github.com/users/Nick3C/starred{/owner}{/repo}",
        "subscriptions_url": "https://api.github.com/users/Nick3C/subscriptions",
        "organizations_url": "https://api.github.com/users/Nick3C/orgs",
        "repos_url": "https://api.github.com/users/Nick3C/repos",
        "events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/Nick3C/events{/privacy}",
        "received_events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/Nick3C/received_events",
        "type": "User"
      },
      "labels": [
        {
          "id": 4,
          "node_id": "MDU6TGFiZWw0",
          "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/batterseapower/pinyin-toolkit/labels/bug",
          "name": "bug",
          "color": "ff0000"
        }
      ],
      "state": "open",
      "assignee": null,
      "milestone": null,
      "comments": 15,
      "created_at": "2009-07-12T20:10:41Z",
      "updated_at": "2009-07-19T09:23:43Z",
      "closed_at": null,
      "pull_request": {
        "html_url": null,
        "diff_url": null,
        "patch_url": null
      },
      "body": "...",
      "score": 1.0
    }
  ]
}