Add your GitHub Issues and PRs to Omnifocus

A node.js application that adds Omnifocus tasks for:

• GitHub Issues and PRs assigned to you.
• GitHub PRs where your review has been requested.
• Notifications you have received.

Notifications and Review Requests will gain a due date of today.

If an issue or PR is closed or not assigned to you any more, it will be marked complete within Omnifocus.

The application will not close issues in GitHub which are marked as complete in Omnifocus -- the GitHub server is considered source-of-truth for issue and PR state. This feels safer and, thankfully, is easier to code for.

github-to-omnifocus supports both GitHub and GitHub Enterprise.

Supported versions of Omnifocus

• Uses tags, so needs Omnifocus 3.x
• Uses Javascript automation, so needs the Professional edition.
• Tested with Omnifocus 3.6.3.

How Omnifocus tasks are managed

github-to-omnifocus tries its best to live alongside your existing workflow. To this end, while it defaults to using separate projects for Issues and PRs, it supports using the same project for both, and it will avoid affecting tasks that it didn't create itself, meaning it can share a project with other tasks.

To avoid affecting tasks that it doesn't "own", when github-to-omnifocus creates tasks they are given the tag github (can be changed via configuration). Further, they are given a "type tag" to differentiate whether they are issues, PRs or whatever. Using tags in this manner allows github-to-omnifocus to live alongside other tasks within the projects it is using. github-to-omnifocus will only ever mark tasks complete that are in the configured projects and have the appropriate tags.

Within the tasks it owns, github-to-omnifocus associates a task with its corresponding GitHub issue or PR using a prefix on each task:

myorg/myrepo#123 My issue title
---------------- --------------
  |                |
  `- Prefix        `- Issue or PR title

Hopefully it is clear how myorg/myrepo#123 links tasks to their issues/PRs.

Getting started

Now you know how github-to-omnifocus works and have figured whether it'll work with your workflow, it's time to get started:

1. Set up Omnifocus projects.
2. Create a personal developer token on GitHub for github-to-omnifocus to use when making requests to GitHub's API.
3. Set up application configuration.
4. Run github-to-omnifocus via npx (included with npm), which will run the application without leaving any installed files on your system.

Set up Omnifocus projects

By default, github-to-omnifocus will put Issues assigned to you in the GitHub Issues project. It will put PRs in the GitHub PRs project. It will also apply the github tag and a "type" tag to indicate whether the task is an issue or PR. The projects are not auto-created and must exist:

1. Create GitHub Issues project in Omnifocus. This can be nested within folders.
2. Create GitHub PRs project in Omnifocus. This can be nested within folders.

Note: if you set up different project names in github-to-omnifocus.toml, ensure that you create projects with those names.

Create GitHub personal developer token

• Open https://github.com/settings/tokens (or the equivalent on your GitHub Enterprise instance).
• Generate a new token with the following scopes:
  • repo
  • user
  • notifications

Set up application configuration (.github-to-omnifocus.toml)

Create ~/.github-to-omnifocus.toml. This must contain a value for the auth_token field in the [github] table, which is used for API calls to GitHub. See below for how to configure github-to-omnifocus to use a GitHub Enterprise server.

[github]
auth_token = "myauthtoken"  # App will fail to launch if this isn't set

Run github-to-omnifocus using npx

Ensure Omnifocus is open. Then run using:

npx @mikerhodes/github-to-omnifocus sync

npx is included with npm so you probably have it installed. It will run the application without leaving any installed files on your system.

Other configuration values

There are several other options that can be set in ~/.github-to-omnifocus.toml. The following values are the defaults; you can leave out these values if they are correct for your use-case. As mentioned, the only value that must be specified is auth_token.

[github]
api_url = "https://api.github.com"  # Change when using GitHub Enterprise
auth_token = ""

[omnifocus]
app_tag = "github"                  # Used by app to find its own tasks
assigned_project = "GitHub Assigned"
review_project = "GitHub Reviews"
notifications_project = "GitHub Notifications"

• If you use github as a tag in other contexts, you may want to change the app_tag value. Strictly, this is only required if other tasks with the github tag will be found within the projects that github-to-omnifocus are using -- both project and tag are considered for whether github-to-omnifocus "owns" a task and so may modify it.
• The issue_project and pr_project can be the same project and can also be used for other tasks -- github-to-omnifocus uses the app_tag and two internal tags to find the tasks it "owns" and which type they are.
• The api_url for a GitHub Enterprise install will look something like https://github.mycompany.com/api/v3.

Known Issues

See the Issues in this repository.