Auto-close and Auto-archive

Enable these team-based settings to automatically close stale issues and archive completed and canceled issues.

Why use these features

We designed Auto-close and Auto-archive to save you time, reduce organizational maintenance and help you be more focused and productive. With Auto-close enabled, you won't have to sift through overwhelming backlogs to cancel outdated issues and will avoid growing a large backlog in the first place. With Auto-archive enabled, you'll never have to touch an issue after you mark it done. Archiving helps keep your All issues view focused and search results relevant, too.

How Auto-close works

Linear automatically closes issues that have not been updated after a certain time period. When auto-closed, an issue is marked canceled and we publish a history item to its Activity feed. All subscribers receive a notification when an issue is auto-closed.

Use

Filters to view auto-closed issues. Type F then auto-close and further refine the results with additional filters or by using the

Search. You can re-open an auto-closed issue anytime by changing its status.

How Auto-archive works

Linear automatically archives issues after they've been closed for a certain time period. Issues that are part of a project are not auto-archived until the project is either completed or canceled. When auto-archived, an issue is archived and we publish a history item to its Activity feed. We don't send notifications when issues are auto-archived. You can un-archive an auto-archived issue anytime with the keyboard shortcut # or with the Restore from Archive button.

⚠️

Archiving issues will change older cycle analytics and remove cycles completely once all the cycle's issues are auto-archived. Set Auto-archive to a long enough time period so that you preserve meaningful analytics. At Linear, we set Auto-archive to 6 months.

How to enable the features

Go to Settings > Team > Workflow and toggle the features on. For Auto-close, select a time period of 1, 3, 6, 9 or 12 months. We calculate this based on the last time the issue was updated in any way. By default, auto-closed issues will be given a Canceled status. Add a new workflow status under the Canceled category and then configure settings if you want auto-closed issues to update to a different status than the default. For Auto-archive, select a time period of 1, 3, 6, 9 or 12 months.

Keyboard Shortcuts

G then S Open settings

F then auto-close View auto-closed issues

Did we miss something? Have a question? Email us at hello@linear.app to let us know.