Git export/restore

Note: In February 2025, a new version of this integration was released. Users of the old version can provide tokens without using secrets. The documentation below applies primarily to the new version.

Conversational Agents (Dialogflow CX) integrates with multiple Git providers (GitHub, Gitlab, Bitbucket, and others). This integration makes it easy to export your agent to JSON for a push to a Git provider, and to pull from a Git provider for an agent restore. The JSON exported format pushed to a Git provider is the expanded zip file contents of the exported agent.

Using this feature allows you to take advantage of a Git provider source control features like:

• Agent change reviews using code review tools
• Examine agent diffs using diff tools
• Merges

Limitations

The following limitations apply:

• [Old integration version only] GitHub APIs have a limitation on the number of files that can be updated in a single commit. If the number of files exceeds 500, you may not be able to push to GitHub from Conversational Agents (Dialogflow CX). In such cases, you can export the agent as a zip and use the Git CLI on your machine to push the agent files to GitHub. This limitation will be addressed in a later Conversational Agents (Dialogflow CX) release.
• GitHub private access self-hosted repos are not supported, because Conversational Agents (Dialogflow CX) cannot access these repos.
• The Git repository cannot contain any files other than the agent files exported by agent export. Any other files in the repository will be removed on every push.

Configuration

To configure this feature, you need to acquire an access token from your Git provider, store it in Secret Manager, and provide the secret resource to Conversational Agents (Dialogflow CX):

Access token

To acquire an access token from your Git provider:

GitHub

You need to acquire a GitHub personal token If you use a fine-grained personal access token, you need the following permissions access:

• Repository Permissions > Contents: Read and write
• Repository Permissions > Metadata: Read-only (should be auto-selected after selecting Contents permission)

Gitlab

You need to acquire a Gitlab personal access token.

Bitbucket

You need to acquire a Bitbucket access token.

Secret Manager

Now that you have an access token, you need to create a secret for your token:

1. Enable the Secret Manager API.
2. Create a secret.

Conversational Agents (Dialogflow CX) configuration

To configure this integration for Conversational Agents (Dialogflow CX):

1. Provide the Dialogflow service agent permission to access Secret Manager. Provide the Secret Manager Secret Accessor role to the gcp-sa-dialogflow.iam.gserviceaccount.com service account in your agent project. See Grant an IAM role.
2. Open the Git integration configuration:
   • Conversational Agents console
     1. Open the settings display by clicking the settings icon near the top right corner.
     2. Scroll down and click Add Git integration.
   • Dialogflow CX console
     1. Click the Manage tab.
     2. Click Git in the Testing & Deployment section.
     3. Click Create new.
3. Provide configuration details:
   1. Enter the following:
      • Display name for the GitHub connection.
      • Git repository URL (for example: https://github.com/<path-to-repo>.git).
      • Add Git branches your agent will be interacting with. You can designate a branch as the default branch by clicking the star icon next to it.
      • Access token secret, which is the secret version you created in the form projects/*/secrets/*/versions/* for a specific version or projects/*/secrets/*/versions/latest for the latest version.
   2. Click Connect.
   3. It can take a minute for the Git service to be ready. The console will display notifications.

Push and restore

Once configured, you can push/pull your agent to/from Git.

The Push button is used to export your agent and make a commit to the Git branch selected in the Git branch dropdown. This commit will consist of the entire agent and not specific changes, and will delete any existing files in the repository.

Users with Dialogflow Reader roles have the ability to push to Git repositories. To prevent unwanted pushes, configure these agents with read-only personal access tokens.

The Restore button is used to pull your agent data from the Git branch selected in the Git branch drop-down and restore your Conversational Agents (Dialogflow CX) agent from this data. This will overwrite your agent in the same way that any agent restore behaves.

Example use case

The following example illustrates how this feature can be used by multiple people to propose different agent changes to a production agent.

Consider that your agent uses the following Git branches:

• Prod: branch for your production agent
• Dev1: branch for agent development
• Dev2: another branch for agent development

User 1 wants to propose agent changes and takes the following steps:

1. Export the production agent to a new agent.
2. Make the desired changes to this agent copy.
3. Test the changes.
4. Push the altered agent to the Dev1 branch.
5. Create a merge request to the Prod branch.

User 2 wants to propose agent changes and takes the following steps:

1. Export the production agent to a new agent.
2. Make the desired changes to this agent copy.
3. Test the changes.
4. Push the altered agent to the Dev2 branch.
5. Create a merge request to the Prod branch.

User 3 reviews merge requests from both users and takes the following steps:

1. Resolve conflicts.
2. Commits approved changes.
3. Restores the production Git branch to the production Conversational Agents (Dialogflow CX) agent.