GitHub

What you can do

Read repos, files, branches, commits, releases.

Manage issues — create, label, assign, comment, close.

Manage PRs — open, review, comment, merge (with approvals).

Subscribe to webhooks — push, PR opened, review submitted, issue opened.

Run GitHub Actions workflows on demand from a chat command.

Setup

Install the GitHub MCP server

Integrations → Discover → GitHub → Install. Authenticate via GitHub App for the cleanest permission scoping.

Scope to repos

During install, select only the repos Actionist should touch. You can change this later from your GitHub org’s integrations page.

Set the default org and repo

Pin default_org and default_repo as Credentials Vault variables — most workflows don’t need to specify them per call.

Common workflows

PR digest — every weekday morning, summarize PRs opened or merged in the last 24h into a Slack message.

Issue triage — when a new issue is filed, an agent reads it, suggests labels, finds related issues, and posts a triage comment.

Release notes drafter — when a release is cut, an agent collects merged PR titles since the last tag and drafts the changelog.

Code review prompts — when a PR is opened in core-ops, post a checklist comment with the team’s review criteria.

Limits & gotchas

Branch protection bypass requires admin. Don’t try to merge protected branches from a workflow without explicit approval.

Rate limits are 5,000/hour authenticated. Heavy backfills should use GraphQL with pagination.

Forked PRs run with pull_request_target permissions. Be careful about what you do on a fork-originated trigger.

Webhooks fan out fast. A 200-comment thread will fire 200 webhook events — debounce upstream.

What you can do