Step 1: Generate a GitHub Personal Access Token
Open GitHub in a new tab and navigate to Settings > Developer settings > Personal access tokens > Fine-grained tokens. Click Generate new token and give it a descriptive name like “ClawStaff Integration”. Set the expiration to a duration that fits your security policy; 90 days is a reasonable default.
Under Repository access, select either “All repositories” or “Only select repositories” depending on how much access your Claw needs. Then under Permissions, grant the following scopes: Issues (read and write), Pull requests (read and write), Contents (read), and Metadata (read). These scopes allow your Claw to create issues, comment on PRs, read code, and access repository information. Click Generate token and copy the token immediately, as GitHub will not show it again.
Step 2: Navigate to the Integrations Page
Log in to your ClawStaff dashboard and click Integrations in the left sidebar. Find GitHub under the Development category. The GitHub integration card shows a summary of what your Claw can do, including creating and triaging issues, reviewing pull requests, reading code, and responding to webhook events.
Click the card to view more details, or click the Add GitHub button to start the setup process directly.
Step 3: Paste Your Personal Access Token
After clicking Add GitHub, a configuration form will appear with a field for your Personal Access Token. Paste the token you generated in Step 1 into this field. ClawStaff will immediately validate the token by making a test API call to GitHub to verify that it is valid and has the necessary scopes.
If validation succeeds, you will see a green checkmark and the name of the GitHub account associated with the token. If validation fails, double-check that you copied the full token and that the required permission scopes were granted. Your token is encrypted before being stored and is only decrypted inside your Claw’s isolated ClawCage environment at runtime.
Step 4: Select Repositories
Once the token is validated, ClawStaff will fetch a list of repositories accessible with your token. Select the repositories where your Claw should be active by checking the boxes next to each repository name. For each selected repository, you can configure whether the Claw has read-only access or full read-write access.
You can also configure webhook events for real-time triggers. When webhooks are enabled, your Claw will be notified immediately when new issues are opened, pull requests are created, or comments are posted. Without webhooks, the Claw will poll for changes at a configurable interval. Webhooks require that you add a webhook URL to each repository’s settings. ClawStaff will provide the URL and instructions.
Step 5: Test the Connection
Click the Test Connection button to verify that ClawStaff can access your GitHub repositories. The test will fetch the latest issues and pull requests from one of your selected repositories and display a summary in the dashboard. A green confirmation badge indicates that the connection is working correctly.
For a hands-on test, navigate to your Claw’s settings and trigger a test action such as creating a test issue or posting a comment on an existing issue. Check your GitHub repository to confirm the action was performed. If the test fails, verify that the Personal Access Token has not expired and that the required scopes are still granted in your GitHub token settings.