Issue Lifecycle

Deterministic GitHub Actions that enforce OpenFront's issue lifecycle. No LLM calls — only the default GITHUB_TOKEN.

Rules

Stale closer — daily cron. Unmilestoned issues get a warning at 7 days of inactivity, are closed at 14. Exempt: milestoned or keep-open-labelled issues. Assignees are not an exemption — if an unmilestoned issue somehow has assignees (event drift), Rule 2 unassigns them and Rule 1 still applies.
Assignment invariant — event + cron. You cannot assign a person to an unmilestoned issue. Violators are unassigned automatically.
Approval label sync — event + cron. not-approved and approved track milestone state (none = not-approved, any milestone = approved).

See the parent spec for the full contribution model rationale.

Triggers

issue-lifecycle-cron.yml — daily at 06:00 UTC, plus workflow_dispatch.
issue-lifecycle-events.yml — issues: [opened, assigned, milestoned, demilestoned].

Local testing

cd scripts/issue-lifecycle
npm install
export GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_... # PAT with repo scope

# Full cron sweep against the real repo, dry-run (default for CLI):
npx tsx index.ts --mode cron

# Single-issue event-mode dry-run (simulates the assigned event):
EVENT_NAME=assigned npx tsx index.ts --mode event --issue 1234

# Force live mode locally (BE CAREFUL — this will mutate the repo):
npx tsx index.ts --mode cron --no-dry-run

CLI invocations are dry-run by default. Pass --no-dry-run to apply.

Toggling dry-run in production

Go to repo Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → Variables.
Edit ISSUE_LIFECYCLE_DRY_RUN.
Set to false to make the Actions act for real; any other value (or unset) keeps them in dry-run mode.

The default is true — both workflows log decisions but do not act until the maintainer flips the variable.

File layout

config.ts — constants, labels, comment templates
github.ts — Octokit wrapper, action applier, label idempotent-creation
rules/approval-label-sync.ts — Rule 3 (pure function)
rules/assignment-invariant.ts — Rule 2 (pure function)
rules/stale-closer.ts — Rule 1 (async; reads comment history)
cron.ts — daily sweep orchestrator
events.ts — event-mode dispatcher
index.ts — entrypoint, arg parser

Notes

Labels are auto-created on every run (idempotent). The maintainer does not need to manually pre-create any of them.
Rules act only on issues — PRs are filtered out (pull_request field check).
API rate limit during the cron sweep causes the run to exit non-zero; the next day's cron retries.
No Claude / LLM calls. Layer B will layer triage on top of this foundation.