Question: Does this action work with pull requests from forks?

[alexearnshaw]

Hi, I'm looking for an app or action to label pull requests with a size based on LOC. This action looks perfect, but another similar action I tried did not work on PRs created from forks (which is the majority of PRs in our project). Can you confirm if this action will work on PRs from forks?

[rgomezcasas]

It works! But if it's a fork you need to do some changes.

I'll change the README to reflect it (I'll close this issue when this is done). But for now:

If it's a fork you can't use the secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN because this belongs only to your project, so a fork won't have access to it.
To be able to use it, you should create a custom token from a user of your organization (usually you create a "bot" user for it, like ours) and then add this token to your repository secrets (usually with a GITHUB_BOT_TOKEN name or similar).

So, instead of having something like:

steps:
    - uses: codelytv/pr-size-labeler@v1
      with:
        GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

You'll have:

steps:
    - uses: codelytv/pr-size-labeler@v1
      with:
        GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_BOT_TOKEN }}

If you don't want to create a new user you can create a personal token from any member of your organization. But then on every pull request, when autolabeled, instead of "github-bot have added some label" you'll have "This user has added some label".

I guess it's the same problem you have with other Actions, the solution it's the same for everyone. 😊

[alexearnshaw]

Thanks so much @rgomezcasas I'll give that a try!

[alexearnshaw]

@rgomezcasas I'm hoping you can help me a little more. I've followed the instructions above and this action is now working for PRs created from branches of the repo (see the PR where I added it where it was correctly labeled)
However, it's not working correctly for a PR from a fork - see 2 examples here https://github.com/Axway/axway-open-docs/pull/612 and https://github.com/Axway/axway-open-docs/pull/610)

This is the output of the action:

The bot user I created docsbuilder has write access to our repo and the token I created for this user has been granted all scopes. Am I missing something?

[S-Coyle]

@alexearnshaw @rgomezcasas I don't suppose anyone found any workaround or alternative for this to work from PRs from forks? Exactly the scenario I was hoping to cover.

[markmandel]

I resolved this by using pull_request_target as the target, since that GITHUB_TOKEN has read and write permissions 👍🏻

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/reference/events-that-trigger-workflows#pull_request_target