A GitHub action to label issues and PRs when they're blocked by another issue or PR.

• When triggered by an open PR: Checks for blocking issues in the PR text (Blocked by #X, #Y, #Z)
• When triggered by a closed issue: Checks for other PRs that were blocked by this issue and updates them

Add this file to .github/workflows/blocking-issues.yml:

name: Blocking Issues

on:
  issues:
    types: [opened, edited, deleted, transferred, closed, reopened]
  pull_request_target:
    types: [opened, edited, closed, reopened]

jobs:
  blocking_issues:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: Checks for blocking issues

    steps:
      - uses: Levi-Lesches/blocking-issues@v2
        with:
          # Optional: Choose an existing label to use instead of creating a new one.
          # If the label cannot be found, the default one will be created and used.
          # The default is: "blocked" (black).
          use-label: "blocked issue"

This action will not re-block a PR if the issue is reopened, and will throw an error if the issue cannot be found. Simply edit the PR description to re-run the bot. For a demonstration, see the issues and pull requests under https://github.com/Levi-Lesches/blocking-issues-test.

On private repositories, you must grant this action access in the job.permissions key:

jobs:
  blocking_issues:
    permissions:
      checks: write
      issues: write
      pull-requests: write
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    # ...

If you still experience issues, try removing checks: write and running the action again.

A future version of the action may allow you to specify your own regex, but for now, here is the exact regex used by the action to determine which issues are blocking:

const regex = /blocked[-| ]by:? ((?:#\d+)(?:[, ] ?#\d+)*)/ig;

It looks complicated but allows many expressions. Check out the Regexr tests for details.