I am tasked to help automate the workflow related to automating a few tasks related to management of our organization account on GitHub. For example, add and remove users from the org, create new repos, add external collaborators etc. The requests for this actions will come from a system where a user fill in a form and this system will curl to the GitHub API after the request is reviewed and approved.
By reading the GitHub API documentation I can set up the curls for this, but I am unsure about authentication best practices. My first idea would be to create a user account specific for this use case, make it admin for the org, and create an OAuth token with scopes needed to be allowed to make this requests. However, it feels a bit too hacky to create an individual account for something that is not an individual, and then make it admin of the whole organization.
Is there a better way to approach this?
Related
At my company, we have a CLI which allows our customers to upload data to our backend solution. The CLI runs on PR changes within a job. Let's assume the uploaded data looks like this:
{
name: "John",
age: 20,
}
Once the upload is completed, I'd like to create a comment on the PR with to following body:
John is 20 years old.
I've found the following ways to do this:
GitHub App (a bot)
GitHub OAuth App
Personal Access Token
GITHUB_TOKEN
GitHub App
The GitHub App needs to do the following things:
Fetch the data via a user-specific API key
Create a comment
I already created a comment via a bot, but I have no clue how to fetch the data.
As far as my understanding goes, I'd like other users to be able to install this GitHub app from the marketplace to work out of the box. From the ProBot Docs I understand that the bot operates on a webhook basis. Meaning I need to subscribe to a 'job completed' event (not sure if that's the correct name but I think you get the idea) and then fetch the data via a user-specific API we are providing on our platform. However, I see no way for the user of our App to configure an API key (or any form of secret) so the bot can make authenticated requests to our endpoints.
I'd prefer to use GitHub App because the comment coming from the bot would have our company branding and also an indicator that this comment has been created by the integration.
OAuth App
I already tested this by using Postman, however, the comment looks like it's coming from a specific user. Therefore, it has no company branding and it's not clear that an integration created the comment. However, the great part is that we could integrate this with our application, so our backend could create the comment once the data is received.
What I like about this approach is that we also need to implement such a feature for GitLab, Azure, etc, and using OAuth likely scales well with the other providers in comparison to the GitHub app, which is GitHub-specific.
Personal Access Token
Works pretty much like the OAuth App, but instead of our backend creating the comment, the comment is created by the CLI (and the access token is passed into the CLI). However, I think this approach is a bit sketchy.
GITHUB_TOKEN
While I haven't tried this yet, I assume that the token has limited but sufficient permissions to create a comment. As of now, I don't know what the comment will look like, but I think we can rather safely pass this into the CLI to create the comment from there. Since the permissions are limited and the token is invalidated after the workflow I see limited risk for the user of our CLI (and services).
Edit: The comment is coming from the github-actions bot, which is not the branding we are looking for, but it's clear that the comment has been created by the integration.
Questions
What's the best way to accomplish what I am trying?
Is there any way I can make this work with GitHub Apps (aka bots)?
I am writing a Github App that is able to create repositories in an installation.
When the App acts on behalf of an authenticated user, I would like to check that the user can (by themselves) create a repository in the org.
I have spent a lot of time on GitHub's API docs, but I cannot find the answer.
My first thought was that this info should be available in the endpoint /user/installations. The endpoint lists the installations that the user can access (either as a member of an organization or as an external collaborator). However, the permissions returned with each entry are actually the permissions for the App, not for the user. So, this is a dead end.
Another direction was looking at the (public+private) organizations of the user using /user/orgs.
(This does not seem the right direction because as an App I would expect to operate only on installations...)
With this endpoint, I can get all the organizations of the user. However, I don't get whether they can create repos and/or what the role of the user is in the organization.
Should I use the teams/roles part of the API?
My App doesn't ask for the members suite of permissions so I would like to avoid this road.
At this point, the only workarounds are:
Try to create the repo as the user, take note if it fails. Bad solution because I don't want to tell the user that they can create a repo if they can't.
In the background, try to create a repo as the user to check if it possible. If it is, delete the repo. This works but it seems an ugly workaround.
Any suggestion?
We're building a microservice to interact with Github REST API to read repository information within our organization. At the moment, we use individual user id and personal access token (created for the user id) to access the remote api programmatically.
Our requirement is to have a service account to access the api that has read privileges and no coupling with any individual. I was looking at Github Apps to perform the integration but it seem a bit complicated for our purpose as it focuses on making changes and handling events. We only need to read the repositories and collect information such as pull requests, commits etc. done on those repositories.
Are there any other simpler ways to achieve this?
Objective: Allow different clients access to only read/pull from my private repo.
Overview:
Listed are the different options that I am aware of:
I could invite the clients and give them access to the Basic access level but do know what to have to pay for different users just to read/clone from the repo.
I could create a single user with Basic access level and then create git access tokens for them individually. However, I did not see a way to restrict the access tokens to be project/repo specific. Instead, the access tokens create had the same privileges as the created user.
Question: What is the best practice to provide access to an external user to only access the private Azure DevOps repo?
Note: I have seen this link and did not know if there were other options.
To make the user only have read access to all repos in one project:
You may consider making the user a reader instead of contributor or Project Administrators, so the user can have only read access to the repos in one project.
Organization Settings=>Users(General)=>Manage user=> select Project reader.
More details about project readers you can check this document.
To make the user only have read access to one special repos in one project:
We can control related permissions from Project Settings=>Repositories(Repos)=>Version Control Administrators:
Hope all above helps :)
We've set up a Github app so that it automatically forks a repository for another individual Github user using the Github API. Now we're running into a problem that not everyone wants to give us full read access to all of their private repositories since sometimes they contain sensitive data.
Is there a way to only get read/write permission to a single repository and not the individual's entire account?
Unfortunately, this is not available yet. This feature is still under development as you can see in the Gihub Apps roadmap (and note that I am talking about Github Apps, not OAuth Github Apps). I don't know if this will ever be possible in OAuth Apps but it seems that it might in Github Apps.
There is already a discussion about this at the dear github repository. You should check for news there.
Is there a way to only get read/write permission to a single repository and not the individual's entire account?
Not that I know of: it is easier to setup a new dedicated GitHub account where you would recreate the private repos you want to give access to.
In that new account, you can consider all the private repos can be accessed.
You would keep the really private ones (with sensitive information) in your original GitHub account.
I believe you're looking for X-OAuth-Scopes. This is a well-defined header so that you may restrict your access scope to, for example, public repositories only.
The github developer documentation here says:
... space-delimited list of scopes. If not provided, scope defaults to an empty list for users that have not authorized any scopes for the application. For users who have authorized scopes for the application, the user won't be shown the OAuth authorization page with the list of scopes. Instead, this step of the flow will automatically complete with the set of scopes the user has authorized for the application. For example, if a user has already performed the web flow twice and has authorized one token with user scope and another token with repo scope, a third web flow that does not provide a scope will receive a token with user and repo scope.