Documentation
GitHub Integration
Available on Starter, Growth, Premium & Enterprise plans
This guide will walk you through setting up the GitHub integration. The Orbit GitHub integration will automatically ingest contributors and activities from the repos you provide access to. We'll create a profile for every contributor, a global and personal timeline for all activities, and generate an automatic report.
The table below summarizes what is included in this integration:
Activities | - Issue is created
- Comments on issues
- Comments on pull requests
- Star on a repository
- Fork of a repository
- Pull request created
- Pull request merged
- Discussion created
- Discussion comment created |
Historical Import | - All the above activities from the start of each repository |
Does not track or import | - Un-star on a repository
- Repository Dependencies |
Installing the Orbit app in your GitHub organization
With your workspace created, the next step is to install the Orbit for GitHub app, which will sync your repos with your workspace.
You can find GitHub in the list the Integrations page in your workspace's Settings.
The Orbit app will ask for Read-only permissions, and you can select which repos it will have access to.
🚧 If you aren’t the admin of the GitHub organization, you won’t be able to install the app yourself, you’ll need to request it.
You can import all repositories, or select any number of specific ones.
If you choose "All", Orbit will connect to all public repositories. If you choose a specific set of repositories, public or private, Orbit will connect to those and those only. If you wish to have a hybrid of public and private repositories connected to Orbit, you'll need to choose "Only select repositories" and select all of the ones you're interested in.
📘 Tip: you can attach multiple GitHub orgs to an Orbit workspace
Historical and future activities import
Orbit will now import all the previous activities and contributors from your organization's repos and be set up to grab any of those activities that happen in future. It may take a few minutes to fully sync.
The full list of activities that this integration will monitor are as follows:
- Pull request opened
- Pull request merged
- Issue opened
- Issue comment created
- Discussion created
- Discussion comment created
- Repository star created
You can check all of the activity types created by the GitHub integration (and any other integration) from your workspace Settings page, by clicking on Activity Types.
Configuring your installation post-setup
If you need to update which repos are included in your workspace, navigate to the Integrations section of your workspace Settings. Your GitHub settings can be modified by clicking on GitHub in the Connected Integrations list.
Locate the Repository permissions section on the settings page. You will be directed to GitHub to manage which repositories Orbit has access to.
Understanding GitHub data in Orbit post-setup
You may notice a small discrepancy between the count of GitHub stars and the count of GitHub issues showing in GitHub vs Orbit.
GitHub Stars
A small discrepancy between the count of GitHub stars shown in GitHub vs count of GitHub stars shown in Orbit is expected. One reason is that Orbit does not track removed stars or "un-stars". Therefore, you can expect Orbit to reflect a slightly higher star count than you see in GitHub.
GitHub Issues
GitHub issues are typically represented 1:1 between GitHub and Orbit. If it's not 1:1, there can be a few situations that explain why the discrepancy exists:
- Issues created by bots - Orbit ignores most bot activity
- Deleted members - issues opened by them are also deleted
- Initial import or GitHub outages - In some cases, GitHub issues are missing from Orbit because of errors in the initial import or GitHub outages. If you see missing data, please contact support.
Note that this information also applies to pull requests.
Orbit regularly checks our metrics against GitHub to make sure that any discrepancies are small and for known reasons. Please let us know if you see data that is missing or numbers that seem incorrect. Thank you!