Feature Request: `get_labels` or `get_all_labels`

[benvillalobos]

Describe the feature or problem you’d like to solve

VS Code is moving towards agentic workflows to do things like suggest labels to be applied to an issue. It would be nice to have an MCP tool that could fetch all labels of a given repo so the agent could then suggest which labels best fit a given issue.

Proposed solution

How will it benefit GitHub MCP Server and its users?

Example prompts or workflows (for tools/toolsets only)

"Use the get_labels tool to get all labels this repo has, and suggest all appropriate labels that apply to this issue based on XYZ criteria"

Additional context

Ref: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-engineering/issues/1689

[Abishek-Newar]

Hi @benvillalobos ,
This functionality already exists via the list_label tool in the labels toolset.

You can use it like this:
Use the list_label tool with owner and repo to get all labels this repo has, and suggest all appropriate labels that apply to this issue based on XYZ criteria

The tool returns all labels with their id, name, color, and description fields.

Reference: pkg/github/labels.go#L122-L210

That said, there are a couple of potential improvements that could be made:

• Naming: Adding get_labels as an alias might improve discoverability, since list_label (singular) isn't immediately intuitive for "get all labels"
• Pagination: The current implementation fetches only the first 100 labels. Repos with 100+ labels would have incomplete results.

Let me know if you'd like me to contribute a PR for these enhancements, as I am interested to contribute to this

[benvillalobos]

Thanks for the response @Abishek-Newar
I was wondering why I couldn't see it. I believe this feature request is actually for the remote MCP server. My MCP config looks like:

"github": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://api.githubcopilot.com/mcp/",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer <removed>",
		"X-MCP-Toolsets": "all"
      }
    }

And I don't see the list_label tool

[Abishek-Newar]

Hi @benvillalobos , thanks for the clarification!

You're right - while the list_label tool exists in the codebase (labels.go#L122-L210), it seems like it may not be exposed on the remote MCP server at api.githubcopilot.com.

This appears to be a deployment/configuration issue on the remote server side rather than a missing implementation. The GitHub team that manages the hosted MCP server would need to ensure the labels toolset (which includes list_label) is enabled and available.

In the meantime, if you're able to run the MCP server locally, the tool should work as expected.

[kerobbi]

Hey @benvillalobos, as @Abishek-Newar mentioned, list_label in the labels toolset does what you are looking for.

I tested with your config against the latest version of the remote server and couldn't reproduce the visibility issue - list_label shows up for me. Can you please try again and let me know if it's still missing? If so, try renaming the server in your mcp.json (e.g., github to gh-mcp) and restarting VS Code to see if it might be a cache issue.