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GitHub ​

Connect GitHub and a draft can tell a customer whether a reported bug is known, whether it is still open, and which release fixed it. If you allow it, your support team can also open GitHub issues from a conversation.

What you need ​

  • A fine-grained personal access token, created at github.com/settings/personal-access-tokens. A classic token is refused, because it could push code to every repository you can reach.
  • The repositories to read, in owner/name form.

Connect GitHub ​

  1. In GitHub, create a fine-grained token. Tick the repositories you will list, and give it read access to Metadata, Contents and Issues.
  2. To let your team open issues from a conversation, set Issues to read and write instead. Read is enough for everything else.
  3. In Overdesk, open Integrations and choose GitHub.
  4. Paste the token into Fine-grained token.
  5. List the repositories in Repositories, one per line, up to 20. A pasted GitHub URL works too.
  6. Click Connect. Overdesk checks that the token reaches each repository before saving anything, and the repositories sync that night.

If a repository comes back as not found, the token was usually not given access to it. A fine-grained token reaches only the repositories you ticked when you created it.

What Overdesk reads ​

Each night Overdesk syncs the issues and published releases of the repositories you list, so a draft can name the version a fix shipped in. It also indexes each repository's file list and README, and can open a single file while a draft is being written when the answer depends on what the code does. Your code is never added to the knowledge base, Overdesk is instructed not to quote code in a reply, and your team reviews every draft before it is sent. See GitHub, Linear and Jira.

Opening issues ​

Opening an issue from a conversation is the one thing Overdesk writes to GitHub. A person confirms every issue, and contact details are stripped out first. When the repository is public, the form warns you before you post. See Creating issues from a conversation.

It needs the token's Issues permission set to read and write. If your token is read-only, Overdesk says so when someone tries, and the fix is to edit the token in GitHub and change Issues from read to read and write.

Change repositories later ​

On the GitHub page in Integrations, under "Which repositories should Overdesk read?", add or remove repositories without reconnecting. The token must already have access to any repository you add. Removing one takes its issues and releases out of your knowledge base, and your team can no longer open issues in it. Nothing in GitHub is touched.