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Add autolink references to GitHub pull request titles

Alright is a Google Chrome extension that automatically turns JIRA (and other) references in GitHub pull request titles into hyperlinks.

Two screenshots that show how the Alright browser extension turns references to external sources in pull request overviews and detail pages into hyperlinks.
This is how GitHub’s own autolink references should have worked

On paid GitHub plans (GitHub Pro, GitHub Team or GitHub Enterprise), repository-wide autolinks can be set up to external issue trackers like JIRA and Zendesk. Once you do this, in commit messages and pull request descriptions will be automatically converted into a hyperlink to the ticket that is being referenced. This allows teams to easily look up the context for a change.

For reasons that I don’t quite understand, these autolinks are not added to pull request titles. This means that everyone needs to look up the corresponding issue manually, or has to hope that the pull request author has also included the issue number in a commit message title or the pull request description.

This is why I built Alright (AutoLink References In GitHub Titles), an open-source browser extension that allows you to add GitHub-wide autolinks to pull request titles in all your repositories via a familiar user interface, even without a paid plan. You can download Alright from the Chrome Web Store for free.

To set up autolink references with Alright:

  1. Install the browser extension and click on the yellow Alright icon to open its settings panel.

  2. Click on the “Add autolink reference” button. Select the identifier type (alphanumeric or numeric) for your issue tracker, its prefix, and the target URL that autolinks should point to. When you’re done, click “Add autolink reference” to save your changes.

That’s it! I hope that Alright makes your life a little bit easier (and that GitHub will implement autolinks in pull requests natively so that you no longer need this browser extension).

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