GitHub Issues & Pull Requests Monitor

Monitor GitHub issues and pull requests across repositories, organizations, users, or any GitHub search query — and export clean, structured records of new, updated, closed, and merged activity.

Built for recurring monitoring: point it at the projects you care about, schedule it, and get a tidy dataset of issue and PR activity every run.

What you can do with it

• Developer relations — keep an eye on issues and PRs across the repos your community depends on.
• Security triage — watch for newly opened issues or PRs that mention security-relevant topics.
• Competitive & market tracking — follow activity in competitors' open-source projects.
• OSS maintenance — track incoming issues and pull requests across an entire organization.
• Sales & lead signals — surface people opening issues or PRs around topics you sell into.

Features

• Monitor by repository (owner/repo), organization, user, or raw GitHub search query.
• Collect issues, pull requests, or both.
• Filter by state (open / closed / all), labels, and updated-since timestamp.
• Pull-request records include merged state and merge date.
• Optional comment counts and reaction counts per item.
• Incremental monitoring: optionally remember the last activity per source and only collect what changed on the next run.
• Works without any credentials for public data; add a GitHub token for substantially higher rate limits and to read private repositories your token can access.

Input

Field	Type	Description
repositories	array	Repositories to monitor as owner/repo (or a full GitHub URL).
organizations	array	Organization logins to monitor across their repositories.
users	array	User logins whose issues and pull requests to monitor.
searchQueries	array	Raw GitHub issue-search queries for advanced monitoring.
itemKinds	string	issues, pullRequests, or both (default both).
state	string	open, closed, or all (default open).
since	string	Only items updated at/after this ISO-8601 timestamp, e.g. 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z.
labels	array	Only items carrying all of these labels.
maxItems	integer	Maximum total items to collect across all sources (1–1000).
includeCommentsCount	boolean	Include the number of comments per item (default true).
includeLabels	boolean	Include the list of label names per item (default true).
includeReactions	boolean	Include the total reaction count per item (default false).
useStateCheckpoint	boolean	Remember the latest activity per source between runs (default false).
requestDelayMs	integer	Minimum delay between requests, in milliseconds (default 250).
githubToken	string	Optional GitHub token. Can also be set via the GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable.
proxyConfiguration	object	Optional proxy configuration for very large or frequent runs.

You can combine sources freely — for example, monitor two repositories, an entire organization, and a custom search query in a single run.

Example input

{
  "repositories": ["apify/apify-sdk-python"],
  "organizations": ["apify"],
  "itemKinds": "both",
  "state": "open",
  "since": "2024-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  "maxItems": 100,
  "includeCommentsCount": true,
  "includeReactions": true
}

Output

Each dataset record represents one issue or pull request:

Field	Description
sourceKind	repository, organization, user, or searchQuery.
monitorQuery	The source that produced the item.
repository	Full owner/repo name.
owner	Repository owner login.
itemKind	issue or pullRequest.
itemId	GitHub global identifier.
itemNumber	Issue or PR number within the repository.
itemUrl	Canonical GitHub URL.
title	Item title.
bodyText	Full item body (Markdown).
summary	Single-line summary of the body.
state	open or closed.
isMerged	true when a pull request has been merged.
createdAt / updatedAt / closedAt / mergedAt	Activity timestamps.
authorLogin	Login of the item's author.
labels	Label names.
assignees	Assignee logins.
commentsCount	Number of comments (when included).
reactionsCount	Total reactions (when included).
milestone	Milestone title, if any.
isDraft	true for draft pull requests.
isLocked	true when the conversation is locked.
fetchedAt	When the record was collected.

Example output record

{
  "sourceKind": "repository",
  "monitorQuery": "apify/apify-sdk-python",
  "repository": "apify/apify-sdk-python",
  "owner": "apify",
  "itemKind": "pullRequest",
  "itemNumber": 312,
  "itemUrl": "https://github.com/apify/apify-sdk-python/pull/312",
  "title": "Add retry option",
  "bodyText": "Adds a configurable retry option to the client so transient failures are retried automatically.",
  "summary": "Adds a configurable retry option to the client so transient failures are retried automatically.",
  "state": "open",
  "isMerged": false,
  "createdAt": "2024-05-01T10:00:00Z",
  "updatedAt": "2024-05-02T08:30:00Z",
  "authorLogin": "octocat",
  "labels": ["enhancement"],
  "commentsCount": 4,
  "reactionsCount": 7,
  "isDraft": false,
  "fetchedAt": "2024-05-02T09:00:00Z"
}

Recurring monitoring

There are two ways to collect only fresh activity each run:

1. Set since to the timestamp of your last run.
2. Enable useStateCheckpoint so the actor remembers the latest activity per source automatically and collects only newer items next time. An explicit since always takes precedence.

Pair this with Apify scheduling to run the monitor every hour or day.

Rate limits & tokens

GitHub allows a limited number of unauthenticated requests per hour. For small public runs no credentials are needed. For larger runs, frequent schedules, or private repositories your token can access, add a GitHub token (input githubToken or the GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable) to raise the limit substantially. If GitHub's rate limit is reached mid-run, the actor stops fetching, keeps whatever it has already collected, and finishes successfully — the run summary (the OUTPUT key-value record) sets rateLimited: true so you can detect a truncated run.

Notes

• A pull request is a kind of issue on GitHub; this actor labels each record clearly as issue or pullRequest.
• Organization, user, and search-query monitoring uses GitHub search, which returns up to 1000 of the most recent matches per source.