Proyect: GitHub Assistant AI using MCP

A weekend project that connects a React UI to OpenAI's Model Context Protocol (MCP) to perform GitHub operations using natural language.

The app allows users to:

• Ask for their latest commits in a repository
• Trigger GitHub actions like creating branches
• Interact with a memory-aware assistant powered by OpenAI's Assistants API

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🧰 Technologies Used

🖥️ Frontend

• React (Create React App)
• Axios

🧠 Backend

• Python
• FastAPI
• OpenAI API (MCP + Assistants + Threads + Tool Use)
• GitHub REST API (via Personal Access Token)

🐳 Infrastructure

• Docker
• Docker Compose

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🚀 Getting Started

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/luisSilvaEs/github-assistant-ai.git
cd github-assistant-ai

2. Add environment variables

Create a .env file inside backend/:

# backend/.env
OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-xxx
GITHUB_PAT=ghp-xxx
GITHUB_USER=your-github-username
OPENAI_ASSISTANT_ID=asst-xxx

Important

⚠️ Do NOT commit this file. It should be ignored via .gitignore.

3. MCP function

{
  "name": "get_last_commits",
  "description": "Get the last commits from a GitHub repository",
  "strict": false,
  "parameters": {
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
      "repo_name": {
        "type": "string",
        "description": "The name of the repository"
      },
      "count": {
        "type": "integer",
        "description": "Number of commits to fetch (default 3)"
      }
    },
    "required": ["repo_name"]
  }
}

Note

Do not forget to create an AI Assistant first https://platform.openai.com/assistants/ Also, there is a cost for using Open AI API and it is additional to the cost if you are already paying Chat GPT. Therefore, consider a $10USD montly. If call to the API exceeds free tier, the cost fill increase. You can set alarms though.

4. Run the app with Docker

docker compose up --build

• Frontend: http://localhost:3000
• Backend: http://localhost:8000

Example Usage

You can type prompts like:

• “Show me the last 5 commits from my-repo-name”

“Create a new branch from development called feature/api-integration”

• The assistant will interpret the command and call your GitHub tools accordingly.

MCP & Tooling Notes

This app uses:

• OpenAI Assistants API with custom tools
• Threads for persistent conversation context
• Function calling to bridge ChatGPT with GitHub's API