GitHub Integration Guide | Common Room (Docs)

GitHub Integration Guide

Last updated Sep 23rd, 2026

Overview

By integrating GitHub with Common Room you can see contributors, comments, pull requests, repo stars, repo forks, issues, discussions, and top programming languages for members of your community. Common Room creates a profile for every contributor in your GitHub community and an activity for each issue, pull request, comment, or starred repo.

Availability

The GitHub integration is included on all plans.

Setup

Before integrating GitHub, login to the GitHub account you want to integrate into Common Room. Once you're logged in, open the signals page in Common Room, and select GitHub.

  1. Select GitHub from the list of signals.
  2. Connect GitHub. When you connect GitHub, Common Room will surface activity and insights across pull requests, issues, contributors, starred repos, and comments.

There are two options for connecting your Github Signal:

  1. Direct authentication if you have admin access
    1. Authenticate your GitHub and select repos. Select "I have admin access or approval". The GitHub integration with Common Room requires admin access or approval. If you don't have admin access to your GitHub account, an email request will be sent to your admin to approve the integration.
    2. Install and authorize Common Room. When you install and authorize Common Room to access your GitHub repository, you can select between some or all of your public repos.

If you select to grant Common Room access to "all repos," Common Room will automatically begin tracking all current and future public repos. If you choose "some repos," you will need to manually select the public repos you'd like tracked. If you wanted to have a new public repo tracked in the future, you'd need to add this in your GitHub signal settings at that time.

  1. Begin data import. After authorizing Common Room, your data will start to import. Importing your data may take up to a few hours, and we’ll email you when everything’s ready. In the meantime, you can take a peek into Common Room. The charts and functionality may be a little empty to start but will populate as your data flows in.

For large GitHub repos, data imports may take several days to complete due to GitHub API restrictions. You'll receive an email as soon as the import is ready.

Contacts and Activity

Contacts are created from users who have created or commented on an issue, pull request, or discussion, and from users who have starred any repos.

When connecting to GitHub, you can configure which repositories you’d like to import. Within your specified repositories, Common Room will create members and activities for every GitHub user who:

Import History

Once you configure your GitHub integration, Common Room will import activity history from the repositories you’ve chosen. For admin authenticated signals, we will pull in all history and for API token-based signals, we will pull 6 months worth of history. Imports may take some time depending on the size of the repositories.

If you had a Common Room team member provision your GitHub integration for you, by default, the past six months of data will be imported. This time period can be changed if needed by reaching out to your Customer Success Manager.

Sync Frequency

Once the integration is configured, Common Room will automatically import new activity within a few minutes of it occurring on GitHub.

Obtaining a GitHub API Key

When setting up a Github signal using an API key, please follow the instructions below:

  1. Log into your personal GitHub account and go to https://github.com/settings/tokens/new
  2. Create a new personal access token (classic) with the following parameters:
    • Note: "CR Imports"
    • Expiration: No expiration
    • Select scopes: Check the boxes for " **read:org," "read:user," and "user:email." **
    • Click "generate token" and copy the resulting token (starts with “ghp_")

FAQ

When I connect to all GitHub repositories, does this include both public and private repos?

Common Room only ingests information from public repos, regardless of the option you choose. Private repo information will never appear in Common Room.

How can I sync additional GitHub repositories to Common Room?

In Common Room, open Settings → Signals → GitHub. If you want to add a new signal, select the "Add another signal" button. If you want to edit the list of repositories for an existing signal, select the "Update repositories" button next to the desired signal.