❗ The project is now deprecated as it uses deprecated ProjectNext API. Its' functionality was ported to a TS action.

What is Status History?

The workflow available in this repository help maintaining the following fields on a GitHub project:

• Status History: a list of past statuses an item was assigne
• Status Timestamp: a timestamp from when the last Status change was performed
• Status Date: a date when the last Status change was performed

I advise GitHub project admins to set up the update workflow to run on schedule. Personally, I have it set up to run every hour but the frequency should be adjusted according to the granularity of the updates the admins care about.

Prerequisites

GitHub Token

You need to create a GitHub token with:

• admin:org permission for writing to the project

Project Status History, Timetamp and Date Fields

Unfortunately, it is not yet possible to automate creation of the project fields.

For Status History, Status Timestamp and Status Date as NAME:

1. Navigate to your project.
2. Click ➕ New Field.
3. Name the field NAME.
4. Set the type to 📅 Date for NAME = Status Date and to 🔤 Text otherwise.
5. Click Save.

How to update Status History?

You can either run the script from your console or set up and run a GitHub Actions workflow.

Both methods expect the following inputs:

• OWNER: the name of the user or the organisation where the project resides
• PROJECT_NAME: the name of the project

Console

1. Install GitHub CLI.
2. Authenticate with GitHub by running gh auth login (e.g. with the GITHUB_TOKEN you created).
3. Clone this repository by running gh repo clone pl-strflt/projects-status-history.
4. Perform the update by running ./projects-status-history/.github/scripts/update.sh 'OWNER' 'PROJECT_NAME'.

GitHub Actions

This is an example of an update workflow that you can create in a repository of your choosing:

name: Update Status History
on:
  schedule:
    - cron:  '15 * * * *'
jobs:
  update:
    uses: pl-strflt/projects-status-history/.github/workflows/update_reusable.yml@main
    with:
      owner: OWNER
      project_name: PROJECT_NAME
    secrets:
      token: GITHUB_TOKEN

How does it work?

To analyse the procedure in detail, I advise you to look at the code directly.