Eric J Ma's Website

Today I learned how to ensure that GitHub actions is capable of pushing code to its associated repo.

The tl;dr is:

1. Within a repo, click on "Settings".
2. Within "Settings", click on "Actions", and then "General".
3. Under "General", look for "Workflow Permissions" and then grant "Read and write permissions" to the Workflow runner.

It'll look something like this:

Underneath the hood, there is a default secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN that is granted to a GitHub Actions' Workflow runner. The default permissions are read-only, as it needs to be able to clone the repo. However, we can enable it to push by enabling write permissions.

Once we've configured that setting, within a GitHub actions workflow, we need to ensure that git is configured correctly before pushing. In one of my workflow configuration files, I have it split up into two steps:

      - name: Configure Git
        run: |
          git config user.name github-actions
          git config user.email github-actions@github.com

      ... (other stuff goes here)

      - name: Push changes with tags
        run: |
          git push && git push --tags