HomeAuth ProvidersGitHub

GitHub auth provider

The GitHub auth provider enables tools and agents to call GitHub APIs on behalf of a user. Behind the scenes, the Arcade Engine and the GitHub auth provider seamlessly manage GitHub OAuth 2.0 authorization for your users.

Want to quickly get started with GitHub in your agent or AI app? The pre-built Arcade GitHub toolkit is what you want!

What’s documented here

This page describes how to use and configure GitHub auth with Arcade.

This auth provider is used by:

Configuring GitHub auth

How you configure the GitHub auth provider depends on whether you use the Arcade Cloud Engine or a self-hosted Engine.

With the Arcade Cloud Engine, you can start building and testing GitHub auth without any configuration. Your users will see Arcade (demo) as the name of the application that’s requesting permission.

When you are ready to go to production, you’ll want to configure the GitHub auth provider with your own GitHub app credentials, so users see your app name when they authorize access.

Create a GitHub app

  • Follow GitHub’s guide to registering a GitHub app
  • Choose the permissions you need for your app
    • At a minimum, you must enable read-only access to the Account > Email addresses permission
  • Set the redirect URL to: https://cloud.arcade.dev/api/v1/oauth/callback
  • Copy the client ID and client secret to use below

Configuring GitHub auth with the Arcade Dashboard

  1. Navigate to the OAuth section of the Arcade Dashboard and click Add OAuth Provider.
  2. Select GitHub as the provider.
  3. Choose a unique ID for your provider (e.g. “my-github-provider”) with an optional Description.
  4. Enter your Client ID and Client Secret from your GitHub app.
  5. Click Save.

When you use tools that require GitHub auth using your Arcade account credentials, the Arcade Engine will automatically use this GitHub OAuth provider.

Configuring GitHub auth in self-hosted Arcade Engine configuration

Set environment variables

Set the following environment variables:

export GITHUB_CLIENT_ID="<your client ID>"
export GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET="<your client secret>"

Or, you can set these values in a .env file:

GITHUB_CLIENT_ID="<your client ID>"
GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET="<your client secret>"

See Engine configuration for more information on how to set environment variables and configure the Arcade Engine.

Edit the Engine configuration

Edit the engine.yaml file and add a github item to the auth.providers section:

auth:
  providers:
    - id: default-github
      description: "The default GitHub provider"
      enabled: true
      type: oauth2
      provider_id: github
      client_id: ${env:GITHUB_CLIENT_ID}
      client_secret: ${env:GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET}

Using GitHub auth in app code

Use the GitHub auth provider in your own agents and AI apps to get a user token for the GitHub API. See authorizing agents with Arcade to understand how this works.

Use client.auth.start() to get a user token for the GitHub API:

import requests
from arcadepy import Arcade
 
client = Arcade()  # Automatically finds the `ARCADE_API_KEY` env variable
 
user_id = "[email protected]"
 
"""
In this example, we will use Arcade to authenticate with GitHub and retrieve
the number of stargazers of the ArcadeAI/arcade-ai repository.
 
There is a tool for that in the Arcade SDK, which simplifies the process for
you to interact with GitHub either through our Python or JavaScript SDKs or via
LLM tool calling.
 
Below we are just showing how to use Arcade as an auth provider, if you ever
need to.
"""
 
# Start the authorization process
auth_response = client.auth.start(
    user_id=user_id,
    provider="github",
)
 
if auth_response.status != "completed":
    print("Please complete the authorization challenge in your browser:")
    print(auth_response.url)
 
# Wait for the authorization to complete
auth_response = client.auth.wait_for_completion(auth_response)
 
if not auth_response.context.token:
    raise ValueError("No token found in auth response")
 
token = auth_response.context.token
 
owner = "ArcadeAI"
name = "arcade-ai"
headers = {
    "Accept": "application/vnd.github+json",
    "Authorization": f"Bearer {token}",
    "X-GitHub-Api-Version": "2022-11-28",
}
url = f"https://api.github.com/repos/{owner}/{name}"
 
response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
response.raise_for_status()
 
print(response.json().get("stargazers_count"))

Using GitHub auth in custom tools

The Arcade Model API is a convenient way to call language models and automatically invoke tools. You can use the pre-built Arcade GitHub toolkit to quickly build agents and AI apps that interact with GitHub.

If the pre-built tools in the GitHub toolkit don’t meet your needs, you can author your own custom tools that interact with the GitHub API.

Use the GitHub() auth class to specify that a tool requires authorization with GitHub. The context.authorization.token field will be automatically populated with the user’s GitHub token:

from typing import Annotated
 
import httpx
from arcade.sdk import ToolContext, tool
from arcade.sdk.auth import GitHub
 
 
@tool(requires_auth=GitHub())
async def count_stargazers(
    context: ToolContext,
    owner: Annotated[str, "The owner of the repository"],
    name: Annotated[str, "The name of the repository"],
) -> Annotated[int, "The number of stargazers (stars) for the specified repository"]:
    """Count the number of stargazers (stars) for a GitHub repository."""
    if not context.authorization or not context.authorization.token:
        raise ValueError("No token found in context")
 
    headers = {
        "Accept": "application/vnd.github+json",
        "Authorization": f"Bearer {context.authorization.token}",
        "X-GitHub-Api-Version": "2022-11-28",
    }
    url = f"https://api.github.com/repos/{owner}/{name}"
 
    async with httpx.AsyncClient() as client:
        response = await client.get(url, headers=headers)
        response.raise_for_status()
        return response.json().get("stargazers_count", 0)
DropboxGoogle