What does days-before-close count from?

It counts from the moment the item is marked stale, not from the last activity. So a 60-day stale plus 7-day close means an item can sit untouched for 67 days before it is automatically closed.

How do I mark stale but never auto-close?

Set days-before-close to -1. The action will keep labeling inactive items as stale and posting the stale message, but it will never close them, leaving the final decision to a maintainer.

Why does the workflow need write permissions?

Adding or removing the stale label, posting comments, and closing items all modify repository content, so the job requests issues:write and pull-requests:write. Without these the action runs but cannot make changes.

How do exempt labels work?

Any issue or pull request carrying one of the exempt labels is skipped entirely — it is never marked stale or closed. This is how you protect pinned, security, or roadmap items from automatic cleanup.

What is operations-per-run for?

GitHub rate-limits API calls, so the action processes a capped number of items each run (100 by default). On large backlogs it works through the queue over several scheduled runs rather than hitting the limit.

GitHub Actions Stale Issues/PRs Workflow Builder

A GitHub Actions stale workflow builder that generates a ready-to-commit stale.yml using the official actions/stale@v9 action. It marks inactive issues and pull requests as stale, then closes them after a grace period — unless they carry a label you have marked as exempt. The result is a self-maintaining issue tracker that does not drown in abandoned tickets.

How it works

The generated workflow runs on a schedule (a cron expression in UTC) and can also be triggered manually via workflow_dispatch. On each run, actions/stale scans open issues and PRs and compares each item’s last-activity time against days-before-stale. Items past that threshold get the stale label and a comment. A second timer, days-before-close, counts forward from when the item became stale; once it elapses, the item is closed with a closing comment.

Exempt labels short-circuit the whole process: an item with pinned, security, or any label you list is never touched. The job declares issues: write and pull-requests: write permissions so it can apply labels, comment, and close — operations a read-only token cannot perform.

Tips and notes

Keep operations-per-run modest on large repositories. The action burns API quota for every comment and label change, and a huge backlog can otherwise exhaust your hourly limit.
Set days-before-close to -1 if you only want a stale label and a nudge, leaving the close decision to a human.
Run the workflow on workflow_dispatch first to preview behavior before trusting the schedule — the action logs exactly which items it would mark or close.
Schedule it during off-peak UTC hours (for example 0 1 * * *) so the notification burst does not land in the middle of your team’s workday.

GitHub Actions Stale Issues/PRs Workflow Builder

Email me this result

How it works

Tips and notes