Troubleshooting GitHub Actions: Resolving Access Denied Issues During Automated Commits

If you’re building a workflow with GitHub Actions to automate scraping data and updating JSON files for your website, you might encounter a common stumbling block: permission errors during the commit stage. Even when everything appears correctly configured, your action may fail with a message indicating that it lacks access rights to modify repository files.

Understanding the Scenario

Imagine you’ve developed a script that fetches information from an external calendar source, processes this data, and saves it into a JSON file. Your goal is for GitHub Actions to automate this entire process—retrieving the data, updating the JSON, and deploying the changes to your repository—all without manual intervention. Using a dedicated workflow script, you can streamline this process efficiently and cost-effectively.

The Common Issue

While your scraping and data processing steps run flawlessly, the process stalls at the stage where the workflow attempts to commit the updated files back to GitHub. The error message typically looks like this:

remote: Permission to [repository] denied to github-actions[bot].
fatal: unable to access 'https://github.com/username/repository.git': The requested URL returned error: 403
Error: Process completed with exit code 128.

This indicates that the automated bot lacks the necessary permissions to push changes to the repository.

Possible Causes and Solutions

1. Incorrect Personal Access Token (PAT) Configuration

2. Issue: Your workflow relies on a token to authenticate. If the token isn’t configured with the proper permissions (such as repo scope), it won’t be able to push changes.

3. Solution: Ensure you’ve generated a PAT with at least repo rights. Store this token securely as a GitHub Secret (e.g., ACTIONS_PAT) in your repository settings. In your workflow YAML, reference this secret when configuring git:

   yaml
- name: Configure git
run: |
git config --global user.name "GitHub Actions Bot"
git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
git remote set-url origin https://[email protected]/username/repository.git

4. Using the Built-in GITHUB_TOKEN

5. Issue: By default, GitHub provides a GITHUB_TOKEN secret for workflows, but it has limited permissions.

6. Solution: Check if