Troubleshooting GitHub Actions: Overcoming Access Issues When Committing Files

Implementing automated workflows with GitHub Actions can significantly streamline your development process — especially when it involves tasks like scraping data and updating files. However, new developers often encounter permissions hurdles that can seem perplexing at first glance. If you’re facing difficulties committing changes within your GitHub Actions workflow due to access restrictions, you’re not alone.

In this post, we’ll explore common causes of these issues and provide practical solutions to help you get your automation running seamlessly.

Understanding the Problem

Imagine you’ve created a custom scraper that fetches information from an external calendar, then saves that data into a JSON file. Your goal is for a GitHub Actions workflow to automatically update this JSON file on your repository, making the latest data accessible on your site. While your scraper runs perfectly, the process stalls when it attempts to commit the changes back to your repository, with errors indicating permission denied.

A typical error message might look like this:

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 YOUR-REPOSITORY denied to github-actions[bot].
fatal: unable to access 'https://github.com/yourusername/your-repo.git': The requested URL returned error: 403

This indicates that despite having a token, the workflow does not have sufficient permissions to push changes.

Common Causes and Solutions

1. Ensure Correct Token Permissions
   GitHub provides a default GITHUB_TOKEN for workflows, but its permissions might be limited. To enable commits, verify that your workflow has the necessary write permissions.

Action Steps:
– Check your repository’s settings under Settings > Secrets and variables > Actions to confirm GITHUB_TOKEN is present and correctly referenced.
– In your workflow YAML file, ensure you’re using GITHUB_TOKEN for authentication.
– Update your workflow permissions explicitly to allow write access:

yaml
permissions:
contents: write

1. Use the Correct Authentication Method
   Relying solely on GITHUB_TOKEN may sometimes be insufficient if your repository settings restrict its scope. An alternative is to generate a Personal Access Token (PAT) with appropriate scopes (like repo) and add it as a secret.

Action Steps: