Update an issue with the update_issue tool

Goal: change an existing issue’s title, body, open/closed state, or organization issue type.

Prerequisites

• The issue already exists; you know its owner, repo, and number.
• If setting issueType, it must be one of the organization’s defined issue types.

Steps

1. Call update_issue with only the fields you want to change — omitted fields are left untouched:

   {
     "owner": "your-org",
     "repo": "your-repo",
     "number": 101,
     "state": "closed"
   }

2. To relabel an issue’s type:

   {
     "owner": "your-org",
     "repo": "your-repo",
     "number": 101,
     "issueType": "Bug"
   }

   The tool looks up "Bug" against the organization’s issueTypes first and throws unknown_issue_type (naming the available types) before calling the API if it doesn’t exist — it never sends an invalid type to GitHub.

3. Read the response: { number, url }.

Verify it worked

• Reload the issue at the returned url and confirm the title/body/state/ type reflects your change.
• If you also use github-sdlc-planning’s set-in-progress hook and this update did not set state: "closed", the issue’s board item (if configured) may move to In Progress — see ADR-0003. Closing an issue is treated as a completion signal, not a start-of-work one, so it never triggers that hook.

See also: tool reference.