filter - Can I search github labels with logical operator OR?

Question

I'm trying to filter all my issues on github like this:

label:bug OR label:enhancement

But obviously that does not work. I found this page https://help.github.com/articles/searching-issues/ and i thought it must be written there, but I cannot figure out how to do it.

Could it really be that one cannot filter issues of two labels? I mean that would be such a basic task, wouldn't it?

Well if anyone could give me a hint upon that matter I'd be glad to hear it.

Answer 1

Github does not support searching the labels that way. The searching for issues is considered to be an "AND" instead of an "OR" .

Here's a repository used to try this out.

Example demonstrating github supports "AND" in search

My expectations

All the issues that are enhancement, feature or both should appear..

1. enhancement and feature

2. enhancement

3. feature

Actual result

Only the ones which were both were shown.

1. enhancement and feature

Hence it does not support OR operator.

UPDATE

Another tedious hack around this could be remove the unwanted labels using a -(minus) symbol before the label. Look at the following example

label:enhancement -label:bug -label:foo -label:bar

This will list all the items not having foo, bar and bug as a label on them. This will work but can become tedious if labels are too many.

Filtering issues containing only the enhancements

UPDATE as of 2021

Now you can search using an OR operation. Please see the answer by @VonC