A connector lets your assistant reach into a service where your work lives — GitHub, Notion, Linear, and the rest of the catalog. The good news: the setup is the same for every one of them. You authorize once, approve on the service's own site, and your assistant can use it from then on. This guide walks the flow with GitHub as the example, but the steps are identical for any connector you pick.
If you're not sure what connectors are or how they differ from channels, start with What are connectors — then come back here to wire one up.
Before you start
- The assistant you're connecting must be running. Connectors are configured per-assistant, and the authorization happens inside that assistant's private virtual machine — a small, sealed computer that lives on your Mac — so it needs to be awake.
- An account with the service you're connecting. For our example, that's a GitHub account you can sign in to in a browser.
Authorize a connector
- Open the assistant you want to give access to, and make sure it's running.
- Click Connectors in the sidebar. You'll see the catalog of available services.
- Find the service in the catalog. There's a search box at the top — type
GitHub(or whatever you're after) to filter the list quickly. - Click Authorize on the service's card.
- Your browser opens the service's own consent screen — GitHub's page, on GitHub's site. This is the same kind of "sign in and allow access" page you've seen behind buttons like Sign in with Google around the web.
- Sign in if you're not already, then review what's being requested and approve it.
- Switch back to HolaClaw. The connector verifies the connection, and once it checks out it moves from the catalog to the Active section. That's it — it's connected.
Tip — sign in on the service's site, not in HolaClaw. HolaClaw never sees your password. You type it into GitHub's page (or Notion's, or Linear's), and the service hands back an access token — a scoped key that lets your assistant act on your behalf. HolaClaw just stores that token.
Try it
The quickest way to confirm a connector works is to ask the assistant something only that service knows. With GitHub connected, message your assistant:
What are my open GitHub issues?
If it comes back with real issues from your account, the connection is live. Swap in whatever fits the service — "What's on my Linear board this week?", "Find the page about onboarding in Notion." If the assistant says it can't reach the service, jump to the next section.
When a connector needs attention
Connectors in the Active section show a status. Most of the time it's quietly fine. When it isn't, here's what each situation means:
- Re-authorize — your sign-in with the service has expired, or you revoked it from the service's side. Click Re-authorize, and you'll go back through the same approve-in-the-browser flow. Nothing to reconfigure; you're just refreshing the access.
- The connection check failed after you authorized — you approved on the service's site, but HolaClaw couldn't confirm the connection. Usually the service is having a brief outage, or the approval didn't fully go through. Click Authorize again and complete the approval.
- The browser never opened, or nothing happened after you approved — the authorization wait times out after a few minutes. If you got distracted mid-flow or the browser tab never appeared, just start over with Authorize.
Heads-up — the assistant must be running to authorize. If the catalog looks frozen or Authorize does nothing, check that the assistant is actually started. The sign-in happens inside its VM, so a stopped assistant has nowhere to complete the handshake.
Disconnecting
To remove a connector, open it in the Active section and disconnect it. That signs the assistant out of the service and deletes its access from this assistant — the stored token is gone, and the assistant can no longer reach the service.
Tip — belt and braces. Disconnecting in HolaClaw is enough, but if you want to be thorough you can also revoke access from the service's own settings. Most services have an authorized apps or connected apps page under their security settings where you can see — and remove — anything you've granted access to. Doing both leaves nothing behind.
A quick word on privacy
Each connector's access token lives inside that assistant's private VM on your Mac. It's never stored on HolaClaw's servers, and we never see your password — you sign in on the service's own page. Connectors are also per-assistant: authorizing GitHub for your work assistant doesn't give your journaling companion any access to it. Each assistant only reaches the services you connect for it, one at a time.
Next steps
Want the bigger picture — the full catalog and how connectors fit alongside channels and your AI provider? See What are connectors. Each service also has its own short guide with prompts to try: GitHub, Linear, Notion, Sentry, Stripe, Supabase, PostHog, and Buffer. And if a connector won't cooperate, the HolaClaw Discord is a friendly place to ask.