Resource not accessible by integration

When using GitHub Actions, you might feel tempted to use the action-bound GITHUB_TOKEN.

While it is a good practice, and should work for most cases, if your workflow writes a file in another repository, you may see this error:

   ⨯ release failed after 430.85s error=homebrew tap formula: failed to publish artifacts: PUT https://api.github.com/repos/user/homebrew-tap/contents/Formula/scorecard.rb: 403 Resource not accessible by integration []

Integrations that may cause this:

• Homebrew Tap
• Krew Plugins
• Scoop Manifests
• Nixpkgs

Fixing it

You have basically two options:

1. Use a Personal Access Token (PAT) for the entire process

You can create a PAT and use it for the entire GoReleaser action run. You’ll need to add it as secret and pass it to the action, for instance:

# ...
- uses: goreleaser/goreleaser-action@v7
  env:
    GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GH_PAT }}
# ...

2. Use a Personal Access Token (PAT) specifically for the integration

You can also create a PAT for each integration.

Let’s see, for example, how it would look like for Homebrew Taps.

We would need to change the workflow file:

# ...
- uses: goreleaser/goreleaser-action@v7
  env:
    GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
    TAP_GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.TAP_GITHUB_TOKEN }}
# ...

And also the .goreleaser.yaml file:

# ...
brews:
  - name: myproject
    repository:
      owner: user
      name: homebrew-tap
      token: "{{ .Env.TAP_GITHUB_TOKEN }}"
# ...

Learning more

Read the documentation for each topic:

• GitHub
• GitHub Actions
• Homebrew
• Krew Plugin Manifests
• Scoop Manifests