GitHub Copilot SDK Workshop: Museum Exhibit Studio

Start today: http://github.github.com/copilot-sdk-workshop/

A hands-on GitHub Copilot SDK workshop in Node.js and TypeScript. You build Museum Exhibit Studio, a non-SDLC curator agent that transforms educator-approved facts into visitor-ready exhibit copy behind deterministic application boundaries. The site and lessons are available in English and Brazilian Portuguese.

In the workshop, you'll:

1. Create a Copilot client and conversation session.
2. Separate durable agent policy from task-specific data.
3. Choose between a local application-owned tool, an MCP server, and a tightly scoped allowlist.
4. Enforce capability, input, timeout, validation, and lifecycle boundaries in application code.
5. Explain what the model can infer and what the application must prove.

Plan on about 90 minutes. Machine setup happens separately in an untimed preflight.

Start the workshop

Open the GitHub Pages URL produced by the repository's Deploy to GitHub Pages workflow, choose the content language, and start the workshop. The site derives its Pages base URL at runtime, so there is no hardcoded organization or user Pages hostname.

To preview the site from a clone:

git clone https://github.com/github/copilot-sdk-workshop.git
cd copilot-sdk-workshop
python3 -m http.server 8000

Open http://localhost:8000/docs/. Do not open step.html with a file:// URL; browsers block the Markdown requests used by the lesson viewer.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 22.12 or newer and npm
• GitHub Copilot CLI
• GitHub Copilot subscription or trial

Preflight walks through installation checks, authentication, expected output, and troubleshooting.

Repository layout

copilot-sdk-workshop/
|-- docs/                                   GitHub Pages site and lesson viewer
|-- workshop/                               Lessons in English
|   `-- pt-BR/                              Lessons in Brazilian Portuguese
|-- start-museum/nodejs/                    Starter project learners grow in place
|-- finished/nodejs/museum-exhibit-studio/  Completed application
|-- scripts/                                Content, build, and deployment validation
`-- .github/workflows/                      Validation and Pages deployment

Validate a change

bash scripts/validate-workshop.sh

The command checks that every lesson listed in the lesson viewer exists in English and Brazilian Portuguese, that translated lessons keep the same code blocks and links as the English ones, that the starter helper module matches the finished app, and that the site navigation and localization tests pass. It then installs and type-checks the starter and the finished app without authenticating Copilot or sending a prompt.

Run one part at a time with content or nodejs:

bash scripts/validate-workshop.sh content
bash scripts/validate-workshop.sh nodejs

Museum Exhibit Studio workshop

The starter lives under start-museum/nodejs, with the completed application under finished/nodejs/museum-exhibit-studio. The starter ships one pre-built curator helper module, src/curator.ts, that learners never edit: approved fact sets and their bounds, a streaming function, deterministic exhibit validation, the scoped Wikipedia MCP server with its deny-by-default permission handler, the single-file exhibit.html write permission, and small terminal prompts.

Learners work directly in start-museum/nodejs and grow src/index.ts across the lessons, running it at every step. They write only the session setup, the curator and research system messages, the prompt builders, one session runner that owns the lifecycle and guardrails, and main. The finished sample is what a learner ends up with, not a separate reference architecture.

The learner-facing track begins at workshop/museum-00-preflight.md, then runs through seven core steps — first session, streaming, curator voice, approved facts, guardrails, structural checks, and Wikipedia MCP research — plus an optional interactive exhibit.html capstone. Brazilian Portuguese lessons live in workshop/pt-BR/; there, the prompts and user-facing messages are shown in Portuguese, while the code structure and the ## Narrative, ## Visitor questions, and ## Sources headings that the helper module parses stay in English.

Deployment

After validation passes, push to main. The Pages workflow publishes docs/ plus the Markdown lessons in workshop/. Build and content validation run separately in the validation workflow.

Enable GitHub Pages in repository settings and choose GitHub Actions as the source. The deployment job reports the canonical workshop URL in its environment.

The deployment workflow verifies every published HTML page, site asset, and Markdown lesson. It checks the URL returned by GitHub Pages by default. To validate a future public or custom domain instead, set the repository Actions variable WORKSHOP_SITE_URL to that site's base URL. You can run the same check manually:

WORKSHOP_SITE_URL=https://workshop.example.com/ python3 scripts/validate_deployment.py

References

• GitHub Copilot SDK for Node.js/TypeScript
• Copilot SDK cookbook
• Copilot SDK API and source
• Install the GitHub Copilot CLI
• Model Context Protocol

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

This workshop is provided as-is for educational purposes. It is intended to demonstrate concepts and patterns rather than serve as a complete production service.