GitHub Integration
The GitHub integration gives Barvol visibility into your development activity — commits, pull requests, and repository changes. This feeds the Developer Activity section and lets the AI answer questions about what your team has shipped and how fast they are moving.
What Barvol reads from GitHub
After connecting GitHub, Barvol reads from the repositories you authorize. For each repository it syncs:
- Commit messages, author, date, and files changed (not file contents)
- Pull request title, description, author, status, and review history
- Branch names and merge events
- Open and closed issues (title and labels only, not comments)
- Repository names and languages
Barvol does not read file contents, secrets, or private repository settings.
Connecting GitHub
Go to Integrations, click GitHub, and click "Connect." You will be redirected to GitHub to authorize the Barvol GitHub App. You can authorize access to all repositories or select specific ones. Barvol recommends starting with your main product repositories rather than all repositories, to keep the data signal focused.
After authorization, the initial sync runs and pulls in the last 90 days of activity from each authorized repository.
Developer Activity page
Once GitHub is connected, the Developer Activity page is available in the sidebar. It shows:
- Commit timeline — daily commit volume over the past 30 days, with a breakdown by author and repository.
- Recent PRs — pull requests opened and merged in the last 7 days, with merge status.
- Review backlog — open pull requests waiting for review, sorted by age.
- Open issues — GitHub issues labeled as bugs or high priority.
GitHub and goals
You can link a GitHub repository to a specific goal. When linked, the goal detail page shows a summary of recent activity in that repository — commits per week, open PRs, and recent merges. This makes it easy to see whether engineering output is trending in the right direction relative to a product goal.
To link a repository to a goal, open the goal, click "Link data source," and select the repository from the GitHub integration.
Asking about GitHub data
The AI chat can answer questions grounded in your GitHub data:
- "What did the team ship last week?"
- "Which PRs have been open for more than 5 days without a review?"
- "What is the commit velocity for the main repo over the last month?"
- "Are there any high-priority issues that haven't been assigned?"