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Guides·2 min read

The equity-console GitHub App — what it does, what it can't

The App writes YAML to your fork on your behalf. It does nothing else.

The equity-console GitHub App

Sign-in and write-back are two separate things.

Sign-in happens through a standard GitHub OAuth web flow. It gives us a short-lived token to fork the upstream repo on your behalf.

Write-back — the console committing YAML to your fork when you provision a new app or business — happens through a GitHub App you install on your fork. It's a separate, scoped grant.

Why an App instead of just OAuth

Two reasons:

  1. Repo-scoped, not user-scoped. The App is installed on one repo (your fork). It can't touch your other repos, even if the OAuth token gets leaked. OAuth tokens are user-wide.
  2. Revocable independently. You can uninstall the App from your fork without signing out of the landing site. Or vice versa.

Permissions the App requests

PermissionLevelWhy
ContentsRead + WriteCommit YAML changes to bootstrap/, apps/, and businesses/ when you provision from the UI.
MetadataReadMandatory GitHub baseline for any App.

That's the entire list. No issues, no PRs, no secrets, no admin, no packages, no actions. If a future feature ever needs another scope, it'll ask you to re-approve — GitHub enforces this.

Installing the App

From the onboarding page: click Install App on my fork. GitHub takes over from there. Approve the install, hit Save, you're returned to onboarding with a green checkmark.

If you missed it during onboarding, install anytime from github.com/apps/equity-console.

Uninstalling

github.com/settings/installations → find equity-console → Uninstall. The console will fall back to read-only mode. Everything else keeps working; you just can't provision from the UI until you re-install.

What the App can't do

  • It cannot read or write any repo other than the one it's installed on.
  • It cannot access secrets or environment variables in your repo.
  • It cannot trigger workflows on your behalf (no Actions: Write).
  • It cannot merge PRs. Every commit is a direct commit to the branch you configured (default main) — same as git commit && git push.

Read-only mode

If you'd rather not install the App at all, that's fine. The console works read-only: you can view every dashboard tab, but the + New Application and + New Business buttons show a "configure write-back to enable" message. You can still create everything by hand — edit YAML in your fork, git push, ArgoCD reconciles.