[discourse] "404 not found" on environment against existing organisation repo

[markphelps]

Originally posted by jvallesm on Discourse

Hello!

I recently used Flipt Cloud for a feature flag POC and it worked great, so I wanted to move forward and start using the service within my team. In the POC I used my personal GitHub account to log in to Flipt Cloud and manage repositories that I own. What we want to do now is use my team’s GitHub organisation to log in to Flipt Cloud and to host the feature flag storage repositories.

Following the Getting Started guide, we created a Flipt Cloud account and 2 GitHub repos for a dev and a production environment and we authorised the Flipt Cloud GitHub app to access them. However, creating an environment against any of them (the creation steps are completed successfully) and visiting the environment the outcome is a “404 not found” page. The repos remain empty (no README.md or features directory).

We did manage to create and access an environment by letting Flipt Cloud create a repo for us. Unfortunately, we’d like to manage our repos via an external tool (Terraform) so we want to use an existing repo. I also switched to my Flipt Cloud account (the one I created during the POC) and from there I could create an environment against a repository I own.

Is this an identified bug? Am I missing something in the configuration?

Thanks for your help!

[dosubot[bot]]

This doesn't appear to be a widely reported bug, but based on the code and config, a "404 not found" when accessing an environment tied to an existing GitHub org repo is most likely a configuration or permissions issue.

A few things to check:

• Make sure the Flipt Cloud GitHub app has both read and write access to the organization repositories you want to use. Sometimes, org-level permissions need to be explicitly granted even if the app is installed.
• The repo must exist and be empty, but Flipt Cloud also needs permission to create files and directories (like features/). If the repo is protected or has branch protection rules, this could block Flipt from initializing it.
• Double-check that the GitHub user or service account used to authorize Flipt Cloud has access to the org and the specific repos.
• If you use "allowed organizations" or "allowed teams" in your Flipt Cloud authentication config, make sure the correct org/team is listed and that the read:org scope is present in the OAuth config. Missing this scope or misconfigured org/team lists can cause silent auth failures or generic errors, though these usually show as "unauthorized" rather than "404" errors.

The Flipt backend treats most GitHub API errors (including 404s and 429s) as generic internal errors, so the UI may not show a clear reason for the failure. There’s no special handling for 404s—if the repo or org isn’t found, or if the API call fails, you’ll just get a generic error or a 404 page in the UI, and the repo will remain empty. Logs or audit trails (if available) may provide more detail.

Let me know if you’ve already checked these or if you see any errors in the GitHub app’s audit log. If you can share more about your repo permissions or org setup, I can help dig deeper.

To reply, just mention @dosu.

---

^{How did I do? Good | Irrelevant | Incorrect | Verbose | Hallucination | Report 🐛 | Other}   

[markphelps]

Reply from mark on Discourse:

Hey @jvallesm ! Thanks for trying Flipt Cloud and for your feedback. I think it is indeed a bug that I will look into and keep you updated on the fix. I’ll respond to your email as well as I’d like to request a quick call with you if that’s ok to debug the issue