GitHub now has Issue Attachments | Hacker News Reader

GitHub now has Issue Attachments

github.com

198 pointsjakebellacera72 comments

Oh, by the way, people were asking on Twitter, so we just enabled support for the HTML5 clipboard API. If you're using Chrome, you can now just paste an image into the comment box to upload it!

Very handy with Mac OS X screenshot shortcuts that copy straight to the clipboard.

Neat!

(Windows has built-in shortcuts to screenshot to clipboard too: PrtScr grabs the whole screen, Alt+PrtScr grabs just the active window)

Much easier than:

    Command + Control + Shift + 3

and

    Command + Control + Shift + 4 + Spacebar + Mouse Click

in my opinion.

Yeah but being able to drag a selection beats out Windows by a lot.

Windows has "snipping" tool that does that.

I always reverse the shortcuts to that copy is: command + shift + (3/4) and save file is command + shift + control + (3/4)

Some other os x screenshot tips:

- hold space while dragging a selection and you can reposition the selection's origin

- press space to switch to window capture mode. This captures the whole window even if it is obscured.

Fun fact up until recently (mountain lion I believe) the capture window icon was a holdover from NeXT. I wish they'd left it alone, the new one isn't nearly as cool :)

Feel free to change them in System Preferences to your own liking.

I don't think that you need `Control`.

To save it to your clipboard, yes.

SnippingTool is great too (Windows Vista+)

Finally! This is a fantastic Christmas present. Thanks friends at GitHub!

Agreed. I love how simple it is, too. Very intuitive.

Finally. This is amazing!!!

With Skitch completely screwing their latest release, hosting issue related files (screenshots, doodles...) was painful to say the least. Dropbox did an ok job at it but did not let me embed pictures in the thread (the file URLs change randomly).

Pretty awesome that the guys at Github got that covered.

Obviously a non-issue now, but what about something like http://imgur.com/?

+1 for Imgur.

Hosted all of my images for our GitHub Game Off entry[1] README file there. Always a solid solution if you want any sort of image hosting.

[1]: https://github.com/TARGS/game-off-2012

Do note that imgur will delete images if they haven't been viewed in 6 months.

http://imgur.com/faq#long

Did not know that, thanks for the heads up.

Can you keep pictures private on imgur?

Yes you can. It works well as long as it's up but they have a tendency to go down randomly.

Can anyone advise from experience how long this may take to filter through to Github:Enterprise?

In a perfect world: the next release (usually a few months apart). But software has a way of coming up with unexpected problems, so let's call that a goal :)

We've spent a lot of time this year ensuring Enterprise has feature parity to every new feature we ship on dotcom, and this was no exception.

We design and build with Enterprise in mind. This particular feature has its own Enterprise-specific design considerations and challenges.

The best answer is: when it's ready, but not before.

@mtodd and @kneath, thanks chaps. Looking forward to it :)

I've been trying to get our QA team to switch over from Bugzilla to GitHub for months and their only hold-out was that you couldn't add images. FINALLY! This is awesome!

I find the lack of ticket features in github has been the biggest blocker. Doing any reporting, or saved searches on github issues requires custom tooling.

So, it's images only? I can't find any mention of what file types are supported.

What other ones should there be? Mediawise, seems like video-attachments are too rare to develop an inhouse viewer solution for. For binary types...why would they need to be viewed inline?

I was thinking of non-media files - arbitrary files. PDF, docx, odf, txt, etc. The lack of being able to attach arbitrary files to Issues is awkward. That said, for open projects, I can see them wanting to avoid becoming an accidental free file-hosting service.

Those would be useful but I guess in terms of issue-reporting, screenshots are universally valuable for showing erroneous program behavior...when would other filetypes be useful for that, except in cases of programs that are designed to output such filetypes (attaching an ODF would be useful for an ODF generator, for instance)?

Not just outputs, but also inputs. As a hypothetical example, if I had a project that processed MP3 files, and it had bugs on certain files, it would be nice to be able to attach the MP3 files that triggered the bugs to an issue.

Would it not be useful to have test cases covering the broken behaviour (making it not specific to the issue, but rather stuff you could add in a commit)?

We're talking about issues reporting here, if there's a bug with a file being able to include the file itself (by the original reporter or somebody else) is valuable.

Core dumps and lengthy stacktraces spring to my mind.

Can use Gist for these.

That's not super obvious or convenient for new or casual users. You could make the same argument about images; Just make a new repository (or gist) and put an image in it, then link to it!

This new way is much better.

Since there are no organization private gists [1] you can't use that method for private repositories.

[1] A gist can only be "private" in the sense that it's not listed on the public gist page. No access control takes place once someone guesses the url. That's probably good enough for most uses, but not for all.

let's make it simple. Images and text are the most important things, make it best and fast ^^

Only for applications that don't deal with binary data. The company I work for uses ODF, PDF, DOC and other formats regularly and the inability to attach those files to GitHub issues is a monumental PITA.

Yup, images only.

Glad to see they're working on parts of the product that affect developers again.

Now, if they'd add sortable ticket priorities, fix the janky UI problems (like the thing where you can get stuck in the useless view where tags aren't selectable), and add other basic features like ticket up-voting and support for teams, it might become a genuinely useful tool for non-toy projects.

As a source repository its more than useful for non-toy projects from my experience. While the issue features a bit lacking when compared to full blown ticket trackers, the pull request feature is brilliant. I've yet to see another tool that makes code review and collaboration as simple and flexible as github's pull requests.

This is great. I was just complaining about this today in the other GH thread. What a nice surprise!

Heh, I was complaining about this in the other thread as well. It's encouraging to see some love for their issue tracker.

Now if they could only fix their damn search! :)

I posted this in the other github comment thread, but here it is again (last time I promise), searchco.de allows you to search over github,

http://searchco.de/?q=irq_create_mapping+url%3Agithub

Its not the full index of public repositories though as I don't have a hook into GitHubs project feeds like I do for Codeplex.

This needs to be standard for every image uploader, I can't express how useful this is.

It's one of the main reasons we've switched from Acunote to Trello.

I would love to hear why the github team waited so long to bring this feature into existence? I am sure there is a good reason (or maybe not) but it would be awesome if a member of the team would stop by and post the details.

We don't have roadmaps or a prioritized backlog, so we weren't exactly "waiting" to implement this. Someone got fed up with the image workflow, figured out a solution, grabbed some other people to help, and shipped it.

Now I know github doesn't have a typical roadmap or backlog but I guess what I was looking for was how someone decides what feature they are "fed up" with not having.

We use GitHub to build GitHub, so typically a feature comes from our own usage pain points.

I imagine the conversation internally went something like, "Man, attaching an image to an issue is really annoying. Let's make it not suck." An issue and pull request followed, internally shipped it to test it, and today rolled it out to you all.

That's literally how 99.99% of features happen on GitHub. :)

Thanks Jeremy. That's the sort of answer I was looking for. Good luck with Railcar!

Pain points rule everything around me.

I was working on a project where, when viewing an issue, you could use the file picker to choose a file that was then committed on the project's 'gh-attachments' branch, and then linked via markdown to the raw URL.

This is good enough for me :)

can you speak more to how this is built - even if its just at a high level?

Someone came up with a design. Someone else implemented the backend. We iterated on it for a bit and shipped it internally. Then we figured out the CDN situation, setup logging and metrics, and shipped it genpop today.

Can you tell me a bit about the CDN situation, especially what specific issue did you run into?

No issue, we just wanted to set something up as opposed to running directly from S3.

Ah nice!, easier to drive down the costs that way. Thanks.

Finally. Sharing tickets without an image was often inefficient.

'Cloud', an App, has been a decent workaround for this problem but in-ticket file uploads is better yet.

This goes towards the space allotment given to each user right? If so, I'm going to limit the number of attachments I use. No memes for you.

There is no space allotment for users. Abuse, however, isn't tolerated.

Meme freely!

We haven't had a space allotment for several years now.

I am sure the Api supported this earlier - in fact I wrote a wrapper script for it on lifeisstillgood/githubkoolaid

This I guess is the UI release

Love it. Now all you need is something to crawl cloud app links and convert those.

I read that as github now has attachement issues.

I'll take the downvotes. it was worth it

One should be able to post a silly post every 100 seemingly-relevant posts.

Also the top post in this article is just someone calling this a "Christmas present"; at least you made me chuckle.

What was wrong with ![Alt text](http://imgur/path)?

Seemed like the perfect balance between, hard enough that you don't throw everything on there and eat up space, but useable enough that it works fine when you need it.

Nothing! In fact, the new issue attachments code uses plain ol' Markdown to show the image. The reason we added this is because arcane Markdown code is impossibly hostile for new users and beginners.

Have you ever had a manager/user/whatever person issue a screenshot of an issue using markdown? It doesn't work. Github is supposed to be for teams too (private repo's), and this brings it 1 step closer, but still far from what other services offer for issue tracking.

1) Hard to use for mere mortal users (QA, testers, normal users posting issue for an App, etc. 2) If uploaded to another site, the images are under a different protection domain (for protected repositories.)

great, it's indeed really useful :D I think this should be default for every other text editor on web or (desktop/mac with special shortcuts) :P

Damn useful, I have to say. Thanks our friends :)

Cool. I'd also love labels for PR-generated issues.

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