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Move a bug issue's board status (and optionally close it)

Use this to move an issue’s Status value on the triage board, and optionally close the underlying issue in the same call.

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”
  • The board already has a Status field with the option you want to set. This tool looks the field up by name and never creates it — unlike Severity, there is no ensure_status_field tool. If the board has no Status field or lacks the option you want, add it manually on the board’s Projects v2 settings.
  • The issue is already an item on that board.

Steps

Section titled “Steps”

  1. Call, without closing the issue:

    set_lifecycle_state {
      owner: "<owner>",
      repo: "<repo>",
      issueNumber: <n>,
      projectOwnerLogin: "<org-or-user>",
      projectNumber: <n>,
      status: "In Progress"
    }

    status must match an existing option name on the board’s Status field exactly.

  2. To also close the issue once its status reaches a terminal value (for example your board’s “Done”), add closeIfDone:

    set_lifecycle_state {
      owner: "<owner>",
      repo: "<repo>",
      issueNumber: <n>,
      projectOwnerLogin: "<org-or-user>",
      projectNumber: <n>,
      status: "Done",
      closeIfDone: true
    }

    This tool does not infer which Status values are terminal from their name — closeIfDone: true always closes the issue via REST PATCH after the Status write succeeds, regardless of which status string you passed. Only set it on the call where you actually mean to close the issue.

  3. Handle known failure codes: missing_scope (the token lacks the project OAuth scope required for this Projects v2 mutation), issue_not_on_board, missing_field (no Status field on the board), missing_option (no option matching your status string — the error’s available list shows valid options).

Notes

Section titled “Notes”
  • If your org project has GitHub’s built-in Projects v2 workflows enabled (Item added / Item closed / Pull request merged, etc.), Todo-on-add and Done-on-close-or-merge may already happen natively without any call to this tool — see ADR-0003, which governs that native automation (it lives in github-sdlc-planning, not this plugin). Call set_lifecycle_state explicitly for transitions native automation doesn’t cover, such as marking In Progress.

See also

Section titled “See also”