GitHub for Your Team

Connect GitHub once, at the organization level, and two things become possible for everyone on your team: containers can run git and gh authenticated as the person using them, and Backbuild's AI can ground its answers in your organization's code, without every teammate having to link their own GitHub account. Every credential you supply is sealed in your organization's zero-knowledge vault; Backbuild never keeps a plaintext copy and never returns one to a browser.

The Two Connections

GitHub for your team is made of two independent connections. You can set up either one on its own, or both.

  1. Sign-in with GitHub (per person). Each teammate links their own GitHub account once. After that, their containers can push and pull, and gh works, as that person, with their own permissions. Nobody sees anyone else's token.
  2. Read-only discovery (organization-wide). You pair a single read-only credential for the whole organization so the AI can read your repositories to answer questions grounded in your actual code, with no teammate needing to link anything. It is read-only by design: it can look, never change.

White-Label the Sign-In Screen (Optional)

When a teammate links GitHub, GitHub shows a consent screen naming the app that is asking for access. You choose whose name and logo appear there:

  • Use your own GitHub OAuth App. Create an OAuth App under your own GitHub organization so the consent screen shows your brand. This is the recommended choice for a white-labeled product.
  • Use Backbuild's app. Do nothing and teammates link through Backbuild's own GitHub app. The consent screen shows Backbuild.

Create Your Own OAuth App

In GitHub, go to Settings → Developer settings → OAuth Apps → New OAuth App and fill in:

  • Application name and Homepage URL: your product's name and site, the text your teammates will see on the consent screen.
  • Authorization callback URL: paste the exact callback Backbuild shows on the integration screen. It is the same for every organization, so you never register a custom domain, only your app's branding changes.

Then generate a client secret. Back in Backbuild, open your organization's GitHub integration, choose Use my own GitHub OAuth App, and link the credential: pick an existing vault entry that holds your Client ID and Client Secret, or create a new one and enter them there. The whole credential is sealed into your organization's zero-knowledge vault as a single entry, so it is encrypted before it ever leaves your browser. You can rotate the secret at any time by updating that vault entry.

White-labeling changes only the name and logo GitHub shows on the consent screen. The callback address is always Backbuild's, which keeps the sign-in flow safe from redirect tampering.

Pair a Read-Only Discovery Credential

So the AI can ground answers in your code without every teammate linking an account, pair one read-only credential for the whole organization. Use a dedicated, least-privilege GitHub account or a fine-grained token that can only read.

  1. In GitHub, create a fine-grained personal access token scoped to the repositories you want the AI to be able to read, granting only Contents: Read-only and Metadata: Read-only. Do not grant any write permission.
  2. In Backbuild, open your organization's GitHub integration, choose the read-only discovery connection, and link the token: pick or create a vault entry that holds it. Like every other credential, it is sealed in your organization's zero-knowledge vault.

Backbuild then keeps a private catalog of the repositories that credential can see, and the AI reads from those repositories to ground its answers. The read is always read-only: Backbuild only ever clones and fetches your code, never pushes, so even a token that was granted more than it should have been cannot be used to change anything through Backbuild.

How Your Credentials Are Protected

  • Zero-knowledge vault. Every GitHub credential, your OAuth app's secret, a teammate's sign-in token, and the read-only discovery token, is encrypted in your browser and sealed in your organization's vault. Backbuild stores only an encrypted reference and never returns a plaintext credential to any screen or API response.
  • The discovery credential stays server-side. The organization-wide read-only credential is used only to read your code for grounding. It is never handed to the workload running in a container and never exposed to a teammate, so a person who triggers an AI answer can never walk away with your organization's token.
  • Read-only by construction. The discovery path can only clone and fetch. There is no path through Backbuild that could write to your repositories with the discovery credential.
  • Sign-in is tamper-resistant. Each link is tied to the teammate's authenticated session and is single-use, so a captured sign-in link cannot be replayed or redirected to another account.

What This Does and Does Not Do

  • Per-person sign-in grants each teammate's containers exactly their own GitHub permissions, nothing more.
  • Read-only discovery is exactly that: the AI can read the repositories the token can see, and nothing else. It cannot open pull requests, push commits, or change settings.
  • Discovery is one read-only credential per organization. It is not a per-user grant and not a way to give the AI write access.
  • Removing a connection stops all future use immediately; the sealed credential is removed with it.

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