Troubleshooting GitHub Actions: Overcoming Access Issues When Committing Changes

If you’re building automation workflows with GitHub Actions and encounter persistent authorization errors during commit steps, you’re not alone. Many developers, especially those new to web development and continuous integration, face hurdles when automating updates to their repositories. Here’s a guide to understanding and resolving such issues.

Understanding the Scenario

Suppose you’ve developed a scraper that extracts information from a separate calendar source and saves the data into a JSON file. Your goal is to display this data on an HTML site. To automate the update process, you’ve set up a GitHub Actions workflow that runs periodically, runs the scraper, and then commits the updated JSON back to your repository.

However, despite configuring your workflow, you encounter an error indicating that GitHub Actions lacks the necessary permissions to push changes. The message resembles:

Run git config --global user.name "github-actions[bot]"
[main bc70e68] Update ice times [auto]
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 26 deletions(-)
remote: Permission to [repository] denied to github-actions[bot].
fatal: unable to access 'https://github.com/yourusername/yourrepo.git': The requested URL returned error: 403
Error: Process completed with exit code 128.

Common Causes and Solutions

1. Insufficient Permissions of the Token

2. Ensure that the token used by your workflow has the right scope. For repository modifications, a Personal Access Token (PAT) with repo scope is typically required.

3. Best practice: Use the default GITHUB_TOKEN provided by GitHub Actions or create a dedicated PAT with appropriate permissions, then add it as a secret in your repository settings.

4. Incorrect or Missing Authentication Setup

5. When configuring your workflow, verify that you’re correctly setting up authentication before attempting to push changes. For example:

   “`yaml
   – name: Set up Git
   run: |
   git config –global user.email “[email protected]”
   git config –global user.name “github-actions[bot]”
   – name: Commit changes
   run: |
   git add your-file.json
   git commit -m “Update JSON data”
   – name: Push changes
   env:
   TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
   run: |
   git remote set-url origin https://x-access-token:${TOKEN}@