github_token_setup.md

GitHub Personal Access Token Setup

To crawl public GitHub repositories at scale, IMPACT requires a GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT). Unauthenticated requests to the GitHub API are capped at 60 requests per hour, whereas authenticated requests allow up to 5,000 requests per hour.

Here is how you can obtain and configure your token:

1. How to Generate a Personal Access Token (Classic)

1. Log in to your account on GitHub.
2. Click your profile picture in the top-right corner and select Settings.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the left sidebar and click Developer settings.
4. In the left sidebar under Personal access tokens, click Tokens (classic).
5. Click the Generate new token dropdown and select Generate new token (classic).
6. Provide a descriptive name in the Note field (e.g., IMPACT Crawler).
7. Select an Expiration date (e.g., 30 days, or "No expiration" if only using it locally).
8. Scopes: Do not select any checkboxes/scopes. Leaving all scopes unchecked creates a read-only token, which is the safest and sufficient permission level for public crawler tasks.
9. Scroll to the bottom and click Generate token.
10. Copy the token immediately (it will start with ghp_...). You will not be able to see it again once you navigate away from the page.

---

2. Configure Local Environment

1. Create a .env file in the root of the project by copying the example environment file:

   cp .env.example .env

2. Open the .env file and set the GITHUB_TOKEN variable to your copied token:

   GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_yourTokenHere

Both the local dashboard and ecosystem crawler will automatically detect the .env file and use this token for all outgoing GitHub API calls.