Watch
The watch feature in Redmine allows you to receive email notifications when the item you are watching—such as an issue—is updated.
By watching an issue, you can receive email notifications even if you are not the creator or assignee of that issue.
Use Cases
Watching issues you are not directly responsible for
The watch feature is useful when you want to keep track of an issue ven though you are not the assignee.
Examples include:
- When you are waiting for another member to complete an issue so that you can proceed with your own work
- When an issue you were previously assigned to has been reassigned to someone else
- When you simply want to stay informed about the progress of an issue
If you watch an issue, you will receive notifications whenever notes are added or the issue status changes, allowing you to follow its progress at any time.
Using watch as a personal marker
You can also use the watch feature as a way to keep track of important issues—such as issues you are actively working on or want to review later.
If you add the “Watched issues” block to My page, you can quickly access a list of all issues you are watching.
In the issue list, you can also filter issues where you are set as the watcher.
Adding watchers when creating an issue
Instead of watching an issue yourself, you can add other members as watchers when creating or updating an issue.
This works similarly to adding recipients to CC in an email.
When you create a task and add relevant members as watchers, they will receive notifications about the issue’s creation and updates—just like CC'ing them in email communication.
See also: Issue watchers
Enabling or Disabling Watch
To watch an issue, click Watch in the menu at the upper-right or lower-right corner of the issue page.
When watching is activated, the label changes to Unwatch.
In Redmine 6.1, the watch icon appears as an eye. When you are watching an issue, this icon changes to a slashed eye, which indicates the option to stop watching. In earlier versions, the watch icon was a star, and it turned from gray to yellow when watching was enabled.
