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Prism Repo Onboarding

Onboarding is now a Console + webhook flow. The legacy hand-rolled bulk-ingest script, manual JWT refresh ritual, and SSE-transport wiring described in v1 of this page are obsolete.

This page is a router. Pick the guide that matches what you're trying to do.

Connect a repository

You're a tenant admin and want Prism to index a repo so your team can query it.

→ Console Admin Guide — sign in to the Console, connect GitHub, pick the repo. The Console installs the Tier 3 webhook so every git push triggers an incremental reindex automatically. First-time indexing of a ~500-file repo finishes in 2–3 minutes.

Point a coding agent at Prism

You're a developer and want Claude Code / Cursor / Copilot to use Prism for code navigation.

→ Coding-Agents Setup — install the prism CLI, generate a token (tokens never expire), copy the CLAUDE.md / .cursorrules snippet that tells your agent to prefer prism over Grep/Glob.

Point a chatbot at Prism

You're integrating Prism's MCP server into a chatbot or app.

→ Chatbot Setup — Streamable HTTP transport at /mcp, JWT bearer auth, mcp-remote bridge for STDIO-only clients.

Work on a long-lived feature branch

You're on a branch that diverges from main for more than a few days and want search/refs/outline to reflect branch-only state.

→ Branches & Overlays — when to run prism branch create, the per-tool overlay matrix, stale-overlay refresh hints, the known force-push gap.

Understand what happens after connect

You connected a repo and want a mental model of what Prism does between the webhook and the searchable index.

→ Indexing Pipeline Deep Dive — the 11-step DAG, schema map, the three ingestion tiers, performance budgets, troubleshooting description: null and index_age_seconds.

What changed from v1 of this guide

For anyone who bookmarked the old onboarding walkthrough:

  • No more bulk-ingest script. The Console handles full and incremental indexing through PipelineController plus the Tier 3 GitHub webhook. You don't write Python against /api/v1/ingest/file.
  • No more JWT refresh every hour. CLI tokens never expire (prism token issue from the Console).
  • No more SSE transport. The gateway speaks Streamable HTTP at /mcp (PR #12, 2026-03-08). /sse is dead; sse_client configurations should be removed.
  • No more 4-tool surface. The MCP API exposes 18 tools (see Prism Architecture for the canonical list). The old get_recent_changes tool was removed.
  • No more hand-edited CLAUDE.md snippets. The Coding-Agents Setup guide is the maintained source.

The "lessons learned" debugging notes from v1 (app.state key mismatches, tenant- prefix gotcha, Cloud Run log shape) have moved to internal post-mortem memory — they're load-bearing for gateway maintainers, not user onboarding.