The Twelve Days of Integrations: GitHub

It’s that time of year again, though it may not quite feel it. The leaves have taken their time falling from the trees, department stores are playing “Happy Holidays” on a loop to almost entirely empty rooms, and I’m wearing a big pink hat I bought on Etsy last month because it makes not leaving my house feel slightly more festive.

To celebrate, Shortcut is highlighting twelve of our integrations with a detailed write up alongside their own little digital snow globes. We hope you return every day to enjoy these posts alongside your tinglers and fuzzles, your dafflers and wuzzles, and your delicious pot (or Beyond meat) roasts  

Our second featured integration is also one we recently did a big update for. GitHub.

On the Second Day of Integrations, Shortcut gave to me two GitHubs in a blog post. That's no joke: our integration works with both GitHub and GitHub Enterprise.

Throughout history, different kinds of engineers have brought their work to the public by using a variety of methods and techniques.

The civil engineers who built the Golden Gate Bridge did a “pull request” between San Francisco and Marin through the work of hundreds of people armed with jackhammers and big cranes and at least a few dozen cans filled with International Orange paint. Also, who knew that red is commonly referred to as “orange” internationally?

The chemical engineers who created Windex did a “code review” by aggressively cleaning a bunch of bugs off their windshield after a really long drive down the 5 from San Francisco to LA in the Windex-mobile. I’d ask that you not fact check the existence of this vehicle.

The mechanical engineers who built the Roomba “pushed” their creation out after an awful lot of soldering (probably? I mean, I’m not a mechanical engineer) and a lot more time complaining to each other on AIM about the quality of the code that had been written by their co-creators: the software engineers.

And those software engineers now, for the most part, manage all their work via distributed Version Control Systems. One such VCS rises above all others in popularity: GitHub.

This hub for your git repositories likely needs little in the way of introduction, so let's dive in to the integration itself.

How does it work?

Our integration with GitHub allows you to use specially formatted commit messages to link Shortcut Stories to commits, branches and pull requests, as well as to update those Stories and move them across your workflow.

You're also able to take some actions in reverse, opening PRs for associated branches from within Shortcut, as well as viewing commit messages, GitHub labels and other information within the Story itself.

The integration includes a ton of functionality, but at its core is simply about making it as simple as possible to make your Shortcut workflow a more seamless part of your development process.

Watch this video to see some of the newest features we've added to GitHub and our other VCS integrations:

An overview of the newest features in our GitHub integration

To learn how to install the GitHub integration, visit our set up a VCS integration article.

Once it's installed, go here to learn how to use Branches and Pull Requests with Stories. This article also details how to setup event handlers so that VCS events will change Story Workflow states.

Then go here to see how to use Commits and Commit Messages.

You can dive into as much detail as you like with this (and other VCS) integrations by visiting the VCS section our Integrations documentation.

Shortcut is pretty cool. GitHub is pretty cool. Both of them together? Very cool, much like this wintery month of December.