If you’ve been using Holistics with an external GitHub repository, this one’s for you. We’re shipping a new way to connect, designed around how teams actually work.
The current Deploy Key + Personal Access Token setup has been quietly painful in three specific ways:
- A team member leaves and the integration breaks. Both Deploy Keys and PATs are tied to one person’s GitHub account, not the organization. When that person leaves, sync stops working until someone reconfigures it.
- SSH is a non-starter for some orgs. Deploy Keys require SSH, and a lot of security-conscious organizations don’t allow SSH at the org level. There hasn’t been a workaround.
- Two flows for one connection. Setting up a new repo means going through a Deploy Key flow plus a separate PAT flow, switching back and forth between Holistics and GitHub.
The new GitHub App integration rolls all of that into a single OAuth install at the GitHub organization level:
- One click: install the Holistics GitHub App on your org, pick the repos, and both git sync and PR Workflow are enabled in one step.
- Org-level ownership: the connection belongs to your organization, so team changes don’t break it.
- HTTPS, no SSH: works for orgs that prohibit org-wide SSH.
- Centralized control: permissions, repo access, and revocation managed from your GitHub org settings, with a full audit log.
Already on Deploy Key + PAT? You can switch to GitHub App on the same repo without losing your branches or commit history. The setup guide below has the steps. Deploy Key and Personal Access Token will remain available as fallbacks for non-GitHub providers and for orgs that prefer them.
We’re sharing this early so we can hear from you before the launch. If your team has specific requirements around permissions, the install flow, or migration, we’d love to know.
Setup guide: [Upcoming] Connect with GitHub App | Holistics Docs (4.0)
What would make this great for your team?