Watching your repos (Surface)

Surface is the GATE dashboard's window into GitHub. You pick the repos your team cares about, and Surface keeps a live workbench for each one: the commit graph, the open pull requests, the issues — updating in real time as work lands.

It's a dashboard tool, not a chat one: you use it by opening the Surface page of the dashboard, and it's on the shelf for everyone by default. The repos you follow are shared with your whole organization, so the team watches one list, not one each.

Setting up

The Surface page walks you through it the first time you open it:

1. Connect your GitHub account. One sign-in with GitHub, so Surface sees the repos you can see. If you connected a while ago, Surface may ask you to re-authorize once to pick up the access it needs.
2. Install the GATE app on your GitHub organization. This is what lets Surface receive updates the moment something happens, instead of asking GitHub over and over. Surface shows an install button per organization; installing takes a GitHub org admin.
3. Pick repos to follow. Search your repos, tick the ones that matter. Following a repo immediately pulls in its recent activity — the latest pull requests and issues, and the recent history of every branch.

After that, opening Surface drops you straight into the last repo you looked at.

The workbench

Each followed repo gets a workbench with three tabs:

• Commits — the branch graph, drawn the way a git client draws it: trunk down the middle, feature branches in their own lanes, merges joining back in.
• Pull requests — open, merged, and closed PRs, each with its review and checks status. Open one to read the full detail without leaving the dashboard.
• Issues — the same treatment for issues, filterable by state.

A left rail lists all your followed repos with their open-PR counts, so hopping between projects is one click. New pushes, PR updates, and check results appear on their own — and there's a Refresh button when you want to be sure you're looking at the absolute latest.

You can act, not just watch: merge a pull request (merge, squash, or rebase), close a PR, or close an issue right from the detail view. These actions happen on GitHub as you — your name on the merge, exactly as if you'd clicked the button on github.com.

Housekeeping

The follow list lives behind the gear icon on the workbench. Unfollowing a repo takes it off everyone's list (it's shared org-wide); re-following later is quick, since Surface remembers what it already fetched. If a PR ever looks stale, use Refresh — and even without it, Surface periodically double-checks every followed repo against GitHub, so a missed update heals on its own.

Going deeper

• Built-in tools — the rest of the shelf
• Building & deploying apps — where the pull requests you'll watch here come from
• Chatting with your bot — the chat surfaces Surface feeds