Connecting GitHub to Power BI: An Easy Guide

In this tutorial, we’ll cover a step by step guide on connecting GitHub to Power BI. Doing such enables you to build a stunning workspace with a dashboard, a set of reports, and a dataset to allow you to explore your GitHub data.

What is ‘GitHub’?

GitHub is a Git repository hosting service that provides millions of software developers a platform to share their code, collaborate amongst each other & manage software development projects. GitHub hosts the source code projects in many programming languages e.g. PHP, Python, Java, Go, etc. & most importantly, GitHub keeps track of all the changes made in each iteration by any of the collaborators or admins of the code repositories.     

What is ‘Power BI’?

Power BI is a business analytics & data visualization tool. This tool provides business intelligence capability by showing high quality & enriched information with the help of different plots. It gives end-users flexibility to create reports and dashboards themselves without needing help from an admin.

Features of GitHub to Power BI Data Integration

• Report review
• Analytics
• Data Connectivity 
• Query Editor

In this article, I will show you how you can connect GitHub to Power BI.

Benefits of Connecting GitHub to Power BI

As discussed above, Power BI lets you perform analytics & build reports. Therefore by connecting GitHub to Power BI one can visualize the repositories as well.  

Connecting GitHub to Power BI

A lot of important tools, such as Bitrix24, SalesForce, Google Analytics & JIRA are very easy to integrate with Power BI. Generally, Power BI needs the credentials so that it can connect to the service. It creates a Power BI workspace with a dashboard and a set of Power BI reports that automatically show your data and provide visual insights about your business.

For this, you need to have a GitHub account. 

How to Connect GitHub to Power BI?

• The first step is to sign in to the Power BI Service.
• Select Apps, then Get Apps in the nav panel.

• Select Apps, type GitHub in the search box > Get it Now.

• Select Install In Install this Power BI App.
• In ‘Get started with your new app’, select Connect.

• Enter the repository name i.e. powerbi-docs & repository owner of the repo i.e. MicrosoftDocs. These are used as defaults. 

• Enter the GitHub credentials you created. Power BI might skip this step if you’re already signed in to GitHub in your browser.
• Power BI uses OAuth2 for authentication methods so keep oAuth2 selected > Sign In.

• Follow the GitHub authentication screens. Grant Power BI permission to the GitHub data.
• Now Power BI can connect with GitHub and connect to the data. The frequency of refreshing data is once a day.
• After Power BI imports the data, you see the contents of your new GitHub workspace. 
• Nav Pane in the workspace contains a dashboard and a report. Select the arrow next to the workspace name.

• Select More options next to the dashboard name > Rename > type GitHub dashboard.

• Select the global navigation icon to minimize the nav pane, so you have more room.

• Select your GitHub dashboard.

• The GitHub dashboard contains live data, so the values you see may be different.

See What You Can Visualize in Power BI

Power BI provides you with a number of data points to explore according to your need. 

To do that, put a cursor in the Ask a question about your data. Power BI is flexible in getting selected questions & answers those questions as well.  Please follow the path:-

GitHub > GitHub Dashboard > Q&A

On the left side of the panel, one can view the list of questions that Power BI can answer such as: 

• Top bodies by the sum of commits.
• Top user URLs by total commit.
• What is the rank of contributors by commit by issuer date?
• What is the number of users?
• What is the percentage of total commit by pull request state?

Power BI shows all types of graphs ranging from bar graphs and pie charts to scatter plots.

Connecting GitHub to Power BI using Hevo

Hevo Data provides an effortless way to integrate GitHub with Power BI. It just takes a couple of steps for HevoData to move data from GitHub to Power BI for free.

Visit our Website to Explore Hevo

• Authenticate and configure the GitHub data source.
• Configure the PowerBI destination where the data should be moved.

You can try Hevo for free and sign up for the 14-day free trial.

Sign Up

Share your experiences on connecting GitHub to Power BI in the comments below!