Connecting Your GitHub Repository

ShipRelay connects to your GitHub repositories via OAuth with read-only access.

What we access

  • Repository metadata (name, description, tags)
  • Commit messages and history between tags
  • Pull request titles and descriptions
  • Your email address (for account identification)

What we never access

  • Source code file contents
  • Issues, discussions, or wiki
  • Repository settings or secrets
  • Write access of any kind

How to connect

  1. From your dashboard, click Connect Repository
  2. If this is your first time, you'll be prompted to authorize ShipRelay on GitHub
  3. Select the repository you want to connect
  4. ShipRelay creates a webhook on the repository to detect new tags

Automatic changelog generation

Once connected, pushing a new version tag (e.g., v1.2.0) triggers automatic draft generation. ShipRelay compares the new tag to the previous tag and generates a changelog from the commits and PRs in between.

Tag format

ShipRelay detects tags matching common semver patterns: v1.0.0, 1.0.0, v1.0.0-beta.1, release-1.0.0. Tags must be pushed to GitHub (local-only tags won't trigger the webhook).

Disconnecting a repository

Go to your repository settings and click Disconnect. This removes the webhook from GitHub and soft-deletes the repository from ShipRelay. Your published changelogs remain available on the hosted page.

Free tier limits

Free accounts can connect 1 repository. Solo plans support up to 3. Team plans have unlimited repositories.

Important

ShipRelay requests repo and user:email OAuth scopes. The repo scope is required by GitHub to read commit history and PR data from private repositories. We only perform read operations.