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PREREQUISITES
  • Datafold Admin role
  • Your GitHub account must be a member of the GitHub organization where the Datafold app is to be installed
  • Approval of your request to add the Datafold app to your repo must be granted by a GitHub repo admin or GitHub organization owner.
Go to SettingsRepositories, click Add new integration, and choose GitHub: CI or GitHub: Migration Agent. Leave Authentication set to GitHub App installation.
  1. Pick your GitHub Organization from the dropdown. If it isn’t listed, click Add Datafold GitHub app to new org to install the app — GitHub will redirect you to log in and select the organization, where you can grant access to all repositories or specific ones. Use Sync Existing Installations to refresh the list if you installed the app elsewhere.
  2. Select the Repository to connect.
  3. Click Save.
If you lack permission to add the Datafold app, request approval from a GitHub admin.After installing or changing repository access in GitHub, click Sync Existing Installations to refresh the repositories shown in the dropdown.
VPC deployments are an Enterprise feature. Please email sales@datafold.com to enable your account.

Connect with a fine-grained Personal Access Token (PAT)

As an alternative to installing the GitHub App, you can connect a repository with a fine-grained Personal Access Token. This is useful when you can’t (or don’t want to) install an org-wide GitHub App — for example, to scope Datafold’s access to a single repository. In the integration form, set Authentication to Personal access token. The form then shows the required permissions, the token field, and a repository URL field.

Create the token in GitHub

Create a fine-grained PAT scoped to the repository you want to connect, and grant these repository permissions:
Grant Contents: Read and write if you’ll use the repository for Data Migration Agent (DMA), which needs to commit translated files and open pull requests. Read-only Contents is sufficient for CI/CD data diffs.

Configure the integration in Datafold

  1. Paste the token into the Personal access token field. Datafold uses it to list the repositories the token can access.
  2. (GitHub Enterprise Server only) Set GitHub API URL to your instance’s API endpoint. Leave it blank for github.com — it defaults to https://api.github.com.
  3. Select or enter the Repository URL to connect (click Refresh to list repositories the token can access).
  4. Click Save.
If you omit the optional Webhooks permission, Datafold can’t install the webhook for you. After saving, you’ll see manual setup instructions with a generated secret — add a webhook in your repository’s Settings → Webhooks pointing at the displayed URL, using that secret, and select the Pull requests and Pushes events.

GitHub integration for VPC / single-tenant Datafold deployments

Create a GitHub application

VPC clients of Datafold need to create their own GitHub app, rather than use the shared Datafold GitHub application. Start by navigating to SettingsGlobal Settings.
To begin the set up process, enter the domain that was registered for the VPC deployment in AWS or GCP. Then, enter the name of the GitHub organization where you’d like to install the application. When filled, click Create GitHub App. This will redirect the admin to GitHub, where they may need to authenticate. The GitHub user must be an admin of the GitHub organization. After authentication, you should be directed to enter a description for the GitHub App. After entering the description, click Create GitHub app. Once the application is created, you should be returned to the Datafold settings screen. The button should then have disappeared, and the details for the GitHub App should be visible.

Making the GitHub application public

If you have a private GitHub instance with multiple organizations and want to use the Datafold app across all of them, you’ll need to make the app public on your private server. You can do so in GitHub by following these steps:
  1. Navigate to the GitHub organization where the app was created.
  2. Click Settings.
  3. Go to Developer SettingsGitHub Apps.
  4. Select the Datafold app.
  5. Click Advanced, then Make public.
The app will be public only on your private GitHub server, ensuring it can be accessed across all your organizations.

Configure GitHub in Datafold

If you see this screen with all the details, you’ve successfully created a GitHub App! Now that the app is created, you have to install it using the GitHub integration setup.