GitHub

CatalogDiscoveryGitOpsScorecardsTeams

Summary

GitHub is a Git-based source code repository. You can use GitHub to drive insights into values such as:

• Git repository details (commit history, contributors
• Scorecard rules
• Ownership

Setup

GitHub App

One option to connect Cortex to your GitHub instance is using our official GitHub App. You can install the app under Settings → GitHub.

If you do not see the Settings page you're looking for in the sidebar, you likely don't have the proper permissions and need to contact your admin.

If using Cortex Server, you'll need to follow a manual configuration process to use the GitHub app. Reach out to the support team to receive instructions.

The GitHub App comes preconfigured with:

• Permissions for the Catalog, Scorecards, and Scaffolder
• Webhooks to enable GitOps
• Support for using GitHub Teams as an Ownership Provider

Note: if your GitHub setup involves multiple orgs, please use a Personal Access Token.

Personal Access Token

You can also use a Personal Access Token to connect to GitHub. You'll need to add the repo and read:org permissions at the minimum.

This is a great option when using Cortex Server or a self-hosted GitHub Enterprise instance, since you can easily define the URL to your GitHub location.

Beyond the minimum permissions indicated above, many scenarios will require that the user who generated the Personal Access Token have organization ownership permissions within GitHub. One such scenario is determing the status of branch protection.

If you are looking to use the GitHub Dependabot rules then you must verify you have the necessary permissions on repositories you'd like to see vulnerabilities on. To verify, navigate to a repository on GitHub and click "Settings" -> "Code security and analysis" and make sure you are a member of a team under "Access to alerts".

If you're using a self-hosted instance of GitHub, you'll need to verify that your Cortex instance is able to reach the GitHub instance.
We route our requests through a static IP address. Reach out to support at help@cortex.io to receive details about our static IP. If you're unable to directly whitelist our static IP, you can route requests through a secondary proxy in your network that has this IP whitelisted, and have that proxy route traffic to your GitHub instance.

Registration

You can use GitHub to define metadata about the entity's GitHub repo as well as ownership.

Catalog Descriptor

Git

x-cortex-git:
  github:
    repository: <org>/<repo>
    basepath: myService # optional

Field	Description	Required
repository	org/repo as defined in GitHub	true
basepath	If the entity is in a monorepo (e.g. in a subdirectory), use this field to define the subdir	false

The value for repository should be the user/repo as defined in GitHub.

Ownership

You can define the following block in your Cortex Catalog Descriptor to add your GitHub teams.

Team name should be of the form <org>/<team>. Team names are generally converted to lowercase with - separators (Team Name would be cortexapps/team-name) — but you can verify your exact name from the permalink in GitHub.

x-cortex-owners:
  - type: group
    name: cortex/engineering # Must be of form <org>/<team>
    provider: GITHUB
    description: This is a description for this owner # optional