Understanding and Troubleshooting GitHub Actions Permission Issues in Your WordPress Deployment Workflow

In the realm of modern web development, automation tools like GitHub Actions have become essential for streamlining workflows such as data scraping, content updating, and deployment. However, even for newcomers, encountering permission errors can be confusing and hinder progress.

Recently, I came across a scenario where a developer created an automation script to scrape data from an external calendar, store the information in a JSON file, and display it on a WordPress site. The workflow ran smoothly until it reached the commit stage, where it repeatedly failed with access denied errors. Here’s a comprehensive overview of the typical challenge and some strategies to resolve it.

The Situation

The developer’s goal was to automate updating a JSON file on their GitHub repository using GitHub Actions. The process involved:

• Extracting data from a separate calendar.
• Saving that data into a JSON file within the repository.
• Using a WordPress site to display this data dynamically.

They set up a GitHub Actions workflow to perform the scraping and JSON update automatically. While the scraping part executed successfully, the workflow faltered when attempting to push changes back to the repository.

The Core Issue

The recurring error message was:

remote: Permission to [repository] denied to github-actions[bot].
fatal: unable to access '[repository-url]': The requested URL returned error: 403

This indicates that the automation process lacked the proper permissions to push changes. Despite generating a personal access token (PAT), the process failed because of permission issues.

Common Causes and Solutions

1. Incorrect or Missing Tokens
   Ensure that the token used in your GitHub Actions workflow has the correct scopes. For repository write access, you should generate a token with at least repo scope. Also, verify that this token is correctly stored as a GitHub Secret and referenced in your workflow.

2. Token Usage in Workflow
   When configuring your workflow, make sure you’re using the secret token correctly in the git commands. For example:

“`yaml
– name: Configure Git
run: |
git config –global user.name “GitHub Actions Bot”
git config –global user.email “[email protected]”
– name: Commit changes
run: |
git add yourfile.json
git commit -m “Update calendar data”
git push origin main
env:
GITHUB_TOKEN