GitHub project board examples you can rebuild

A GitHub project board is only as useful as its fields, views, filters and workflows. This guide gives five setups that cover most teams: a solo developer, a small team running sprints, open source triage, a bug tracker and a roadmap. Each one is spelled out so you can rebuild it in a new project in a few minutes, and each ends with how the same board behaves in Gitsu.

The GitHub details come from a project we audited on github.com on 2026-08-05: its field dialog, its view menu and its Workflows page, which lists eleven built-in workflows with seven switched on. The Gitsu details come from Gitsu's source code. If you have not opened a board in Gitsu yet, getting started with the Gitsu Web App takes a couple of minutes.

What goes into a GitHub project board?

Four things decide how a board works, and every example below lists all four.

• Fields. Every project gets a Status field that GitHub creates. Its options can be edited, reordered and given a default, but the field cannot be renamed. You can add custom fields of six types: text, number, date, single select, multi select and iteration.
• Views. A view is a saved layout (Table, Board or Roadmap) with its own visible fields, grouping, sorting and filter. A project can have several, shown as tabs.
• Filters. A view's filter uses GitHub's query syntax, such as assignee:@me, label:bug, -status:Done or no:assignee.
• Workflows. Built-in automations that fire when something happens to an item. The eleven built-ins are Auto-add sub-issues to project, Auto-add to project, Auto-close issue, Auto-archive items, Item added to project, Item closed, Item reopened, Pull request linked to issue, Pull request merged, Code changes requested and Code review approved.

Workflows are the one part you cannot script. GitHub's API can read and delete them but has no mutation to create or enable one, so they are switched on from the project's Workflows page on github.com. The GitHub Projects v2 GraphQL API guide covers everything the API can set up.

How should a solo developer set up a board?

Keep it to one board view and two fields, so that updating it costs less than ignoring it.

• Fields: Status with Todo, In progress and Done. Add Priority as a single select with P0, P1 and P2.
• Views: one Board view grouped by Status, sorted by Priority. Add a Table view called Everything with no filter for the odd audit.
• Filters: on the board, is:open. Closed work falls out of sight without being archived.
• Workflows: turn on Item added to project (set Status to Todo), Item closed (set Status to Done) and Pull request merged. If your issues all live in one repository, Auto-add to project with a filter such as is:issue is:open saves adding each issue by hand.

In Gitsu: the board opens with lanes from Status, including a trailing lane for items with no status. The Assigned quick filter narrows to open items assigned to you in one click, and Recent activity sorts by last update. Plain S and P set status and priority on an open issue.

How should a small team run sprints on a board?

Add an Iteration field and build every working view around the current iteration.

• Fields: Status (Todo, In progress, In review, Done), Iteration with two-week iterations, Estimate as a number, Priority as a single select.
• Views: Sprint board, a Board grouped by Status and filtered to iteration:@current. Backlog, a Table filtered to no:iteration is:open and sorted by Priority. My work, a Table filtered to assignee:@me iteration:@current.
• Filters: iteration:@current and iteration:@next let the views roll over automatically when the iteration changes.
• Workflows: Item added to project, Item closed, Pull request linked to issue (moves the issue to In review) and Pull request merged. Code changes requested and Code review approved are worth turning on if reviews are part of your Status flow.

In Gitsu: iteration:@current, @previous and @next are matched against the iteration dates, so the same filter text works. The board can use the Iteration field as its lanes instead of Status, which gives a sprint-by-sprint view of the backlog. Display settings (Shift+D) switches the lane field and lets the list group by any field.

How should an open source project triage issues?

Build the board around an inbox: new issues arrive with no status, and triage means giving them one.

• Fields: Status with Needs triage, Accepted, Help wanted, In progress, Done and Won't fix. Add Area as a single select for the part of the codebase, and Priority.
• Views: Inbox, a Table filtered to no:status is:open and sorted by creation date. Help wanted, a Board filtered to status:"Help wanted" for contributors looking for work. Maintainers, a Board grouped by Status with -status:"Won't fix".
• Filters: no:status catches anything the auto-add workflow brought in. label:"good first issue" pairs well with the Help wanted view.
• Workflows: Auto-add to project on each repository with is:issue is:open, so nothing is missed. Leave Item added to project off, so new issues land with no status and show up in the Inbox view. Turn on Item closed and Auto-close issue.

In Gitsu: filter text copied from github.com parses as written, including no: and has:. Saved views are stored on your device, not on the project. To share the Inbox a maintainer saves in Gitsu, link Gitsu's config to a .gitsu.json file in the repo and commit it; Gitsu keeps the file up to date but never commits it. Gitsu can open a view with the sort order a team already set on github.com, because it reads each view's saved sort.

How should a team track bugs on a board?

Separate severity from priority, and give each open bug an owner.

• Fields: Status (New, Confirmed, Fixing, Fixed), Severity as a single select (S1 to S4), Priority, and Found in as a text field for the version.
• Views: Triage, a Table filtered to label:bug status:New sorted by Severity. Fixing, a Board grouped by Status with label:bug -status:Fixed. Unowned, a Table filtered to label:bug no:assignee is:open.
• Filters: label:bug scopes every view to bugs, so the same project can hold feature work too.
• Workflows: Auto-add to project with label:bug, so bugs join the board as soon as they are labelled. Pull request linked to issue moves a bug to Fixing, and Pull request merged moves it to Fixed.

In Gitsu: plain L sets labels and A sets the assignee on an open issue. The board can use Severity as its lanes, because any single select field can be the lane field. The Unowned filter works the same way, and -label: excludes a label.

How should a roadmap board be set up?

Use dates rather than statuses, and let issues roll up through sub-issues.

• Fields: Start date and Target date as date fields, Quarter as a single select or an iteration with three-month iterations, and Status.
• Views: Roadmap, using the Roadmap layout with Start date and Target date as its date fields, grouped by Quarter. Now and next, a Board grouped by Status and filtered to the current and next quarter.
• Filters: has:"Target date" keeps undated ideas off the timeline; a separate Table with no:"Target date" lists them.
• Workflows: Auto-add sub-issues to project, so child issues join the board with their parent. Item closed.

In Gitsu: switch the project to the Roadmap layout (G R) and pick Start date and Target date as its date fields. Dragging a bar changes both dates on the issue. Gitsu does not copy the Roadmap view you set up on github.com, so save the layout as a Gitsu view of its own. The open issue shows its parent and sub-issue progress, and Option/Alt+Shift+P adds a parent.

How do GitHub's built-in templates map to these boards?

When you create a project, GitHub offers templates as well as blank Table, Board and Roadmap projects. The featured templates include Team planning, Feature release, Kanban, Bug tracker, Iterative development, Product launch, Roadmap and Team retrospective. They map to the examples above like this:

Templates copy fields and views. Check the Workflows page after creating a project from one, because the automations you need still have to be switched on there.

How do these boards look in Gitsu?

Start with the downloadable triage-board fixture for a small board you can reproduce. It specifies Status options, Estimate, labels and four records. Recreate them on GitHub, then open the project in Gitsu. This is a manual setup reference, not a JSON import feature.

Group by Status to place examples 101 and 103 in Todo, 102 in In progress and 104 in Done. In the list, label:bug selects examples 101 and 103; no:estimate selects 101 and 104. The filter guide gives the nested query and expected matches. Those queries have parser/evaluator tests. The screenshots on this page show Gitsu's interface, not a live capture of these synthetic records.

Gitsu opens the same GitHub project in a list, a board and a roadmap, with cached responses helping it display the items. An edit updates Gitsu immediately, then is sent to GitHub; if GitHub refuses it, the client rolls back the change. See data handling for local caches, web proxying and AI processing. Board lanes come from Status by default and can come from any single select field, an iteration field or the milestone. Text, number and date fields cannot be lanes, because they have no fixed set of values. The list groups by any field.

Where Gitsu falls short of GitHub for these setups: it has no insights charts, and its saved views stay on the device that made them unless you link them to a .gitsu.json file in a repo and commit it. Workflows are configured on github.com either way. The Gitsu keyboard shortcuts page lists the keys that move around each of these boards.