Github Actions Creating Pull Requests

So I’ve been publishing a few of my little tools via Homebrew and I saw an example of someone automating this process to check these tool repos daily for any released updates which is a great little automation.

Problem was, it kept giving me access errors. It unhelpfully told me I didn’t have permission to create PRs in this repository with an error like:

GitHub Actions is not permitted to create or approve 
pull requests. - 
https://docs.github.com/rest/pulls/pulls#create-a-pull-request

Which has a fair bit of useful information related to the REST API, but doesn’t exactly address the problem.

Googling around I realized I also needed to have a permissions stanza in the Github Action YAML itself, so I added that:

permissions:
  contents: write
  pull-requests: write

permissions:
  contents: write
  pull-requests: write

Which I was just sure was going to solve it for me… but of course not. On a lark I decided to see if there was any Settings in the repo related to this and there are! If you navigate to:

Settings -> Github Actions -> General

you’ll see the following:

You need to enable Read and write permissions AND check the ‘Allow Github Actions to create and approve pull requests’ to *ACTUALLY give it permissions.

I understand the security reasoning here, I just wish they had a better error message that would have led me here during the first half dozen attempts to do this!