Restflow.io

## Introduction

In fast-paced product development environments, managing release issues effectively is critical to maintaining software quality and ensuring customer satisfaction. Product teams often struggle to keep track of bugs or issues that arise during releases, especially when there are many, and they vary in priority. Manually logging and prioritizing these issues can be error-prone and time-consuming, delaying critical fixes.

This tutorial demonstrates how to build an automation workflow with n8n to automatically log release issues by priority into a centralized system. This allows product teams, QA, and engineering to respond more quickly and transparently.

We will integrate GitHub (as the source of release issues), Google Sheets (for logging and tracking), and Slack (for notifications). The workflow triggers when a new issue is created or updated on GitHub with specific labels indicating priority.

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## Tools and Services Integrated

– **n8n:** Open-source workflow automation tool.
– **GitHub:** Source control platform that acts as our issue tracker.
– **Google Sheets:** Acts as a centralized issue log.
– **Slack:** For notifying the team of critical issues immediately.

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## What Problem Does This Solve?

– Automates the capture of release issues based on priority.
– Ensures all critical issues are logged for visibility.
– Prioritizes issue handling by filtering and categorizing them.
– Reduces manual error and administrative overhead.
– Provides automated alerts to relevant stakeholders.

Beneficiaries include Product Managers, QA teams, and Engineering leads who want to maintain a prioritized and accurate overview of release problems.

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## High-Level Workflow Overview

1. **Trigger:** New or updated GitHub issue with release-related labels.
2. **Check:** Determine if issue has priority labels (Critical, High, Medium, Low).
3. **Log Issue:** Append issue details to a Google Sheet.
4. **Notify:** Send Slack alerts for high and critical issues.

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## Step-by-Step Technical Tutorial

### Prerequisites

– n8n instance setup (cloud or self-hosted).
– GitHub repository with issues enabled and appropriate labels (e.g., `release`, `critical`, `high`, `medium`, `low`).
– Google account with access to Google Sheets API.
– Slack workspace and incoming webhook or Slack app for sending messages.

### Step 1: Set Up Trigger – GitHub Issue Event

– Add a new **GitHub Trigger** node in n8n.
– Configure it to monitor **Issues event** on your project repository.
– Set trigger to activate on **issue opened** and **issue edited** events.
– Authenticate with GitHub token.

This node will listen for any new or updated issues.

### Step 2: Filter Issues by Release Label

– Add an **IF** node.
– Check if the issue’s labels include `release`.
– Use an expression to parse the issue labels array (e.g., `{{$json.labels.map(l => l.name).includes(“release”)}}`).

This step ensures only release-related issues are processed further.

### Step 3: Determine Priority Level

– Add another **IF** node or a **Switch** node to evaluate which priority label is assigned.
– Create branches for each priority: `critical`, `high`, `medium`, and `low`.
– Again, evaluate labels array like in Step 2.

This categorizes issues into priority buckets.

### Step 4: Append Issue Data to Google Sheets

– Add a **Google Sheets** node configured to append rows.
– Authenticate using OAuth2.
– Target a Google Sheet prepared in advance with columns: Issue Number, Title, Priority, Created At, URL, and Description.
– Populate row data from GitHub issue fields:
– Issue number: `{{$json.number}}`
– Title: `{{$json.title}}`
– Priority: From the branch label found
– Created At: `{{$json.created_at}}`
– URL: `{{$json.html_url}}`
– Description: `{{$json.body}}`

This centralized logging allows product teams to review and analyze release-related issues efficiently.

### Step 5: Send Slack Notification for Critical and High Issues

– Add a **Slack** node configured to post messages.
– Authenticate with your Slack workspace.
– The message should be concise but informative. Use formatting to highlight priority.
– Example message template:
“`
*New {{priority}} Priority Release Issue*
• *Title:* {{issue_title}}
• *Number:* {{issue_number}}
• *URL:* <{{issue_url}}|View Issue>
• *Created:* {{created_at}}
“`
– Condition this node to only run on `critical` and `high` branches.

This immediate alert ensures critical issues receive timely attention.

### Step 6: Error Handling and Robustness

– Wrap Google Sheets and Slack nodes with **Error Trigger** nodes or configure retries.
– Validate GitHub labels to avoid misclassification.
– Add a **Set** node before Google Sheets to sanitize or truncate large text fields (avoid row overflow).
– Schedule periodic cleanup or sync to avoid duplicates.

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## Common Errors and Troubleshooting

– **Authentication failures:** Ensure OAuth tokens have correct scopes (GitHub: repo or issues; Google Sheets: spreadsheet access; Slack: chat:write).
– **Label mismatch:** Labels must be consistent; consider syncing GitHub labels to a defined standard.
– **API rate limits:** Use n8n’s built-in retry logic and backoff.
– **Data formatting issues:** Long descriptions can exceed Google Sheets row limits; truncate or sanitize.

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## Scaling and Adaptation

– Integrate Jira or other issue trackers by swapping the GitHub node.
– Add additional notification channels: email, Microsoft Teams, or SMS.
– Generate weekly summary reports using Google Sheets query or n8n’s Cron node.
– Extend priority rules for more granular categories or severity levels.
– Use n8n’s database nodes to persist data beyond Google Sheets if needed.

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## Summary

We built a robust n8n workflow that automates logging release issues by priority. This pipeline monitors GitHub issues labeled for release, categorizes them by priority, logs them into Google Sheets for centralized tracking, and alerts the team via Slack for high-urgency issues. This automation reduces manual overhead, accelerates response times, and improves product quality oversight.

### Bonus Tip

Periodically export Google Sheets data or connect it with BI tools (like Google Data Studio) for visual priority dashboards. This added visibility empowers product leadership to make data-driven decisions around releases.

This template can be customized to fit any product team’s release management process and scales well as your issue volume grows.

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Implementing this workflow with n8n will elevate your release issue tracking, creating a more responsive and transparent product development lifecycle.