GitHubRepoViewer

This component navigates and fetches content from GitHub repositories through the GitHub API.

Most common position in a pipeline	Right at the beginning of a pipeline and before a ChatPromptBuilder that expects the content of GitHub files as input
Mandatory run variables	path: Repository path to view repo: Repository in owner/repo format
Output variables	documents: A list of documents containing repository contents
API reference	GitHub
GitHub link	https://github.com/deepset-ai/haystack-core-integrations/tree/main/integrations/github
Package name	github-haystack

Overview

GitHubRepoViewer provides different behavior based on the path type:

• For directories: Returns a list of documents, one for each item (files and subdirectories),
• For files: Returns a single document containing the file content.

Each document includes rich metadata such as the path, type, size, and URL.

Authorization

The component can work without authentication for public repositories, but for private repositories or to avoid rate limiting, you can provide a GitHub personal access token.

You can set the token using the GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable, or pass it directly during initialization via the github_token parameter.

To create a personal access token, visit GitHub's token settings page.

Installation

Install the GitHub integration with pip:

shell

pip install github-haystack

Usage

Repository Placeholder

To run the following code snippets, you need to replace the owner/repo with your own GitHub repository name.

On its own

Viewing a directory listing:

python

from haystack_integrations.components.connectors.github import GitHubRepoViewer

viewer = GitHubRepoViewer()
result = viewer.run(
    repo="deepset-ai/haystack",
    path="haystack/components",
    branch="main",
)

print(result)

bash

{'documents': [Document(id=..., content: 'agents', meta: {'path': 'haystack/components/agents', 'type': 'dir', 'size': 0, 'url': 'https://github.com/deepset-ai/haystack/tree/main/haystack/components/agents'}), ...]}

Viewing a specific file:

python

from haystack_integrations.components.connectors.github import GitHubRepoViewer

viewer = GitHubRepoViewer(repo="deepset-ai/haystack", branch="main")
result = viewer.run(path="README.md")

print(result)

bash

{'documents': [Document(id=..., content: '<div align="center">
  <a href="https://haystack.deepset.ai/"><img src="https://raw.githubuserconten...', meta: {'path': 'README.md', 'type': 'file_content', 'size': 11979, 'url': 'https://github.com/deepset-ai/haystack/blob/main/README.md'})]}