Why need to login in CI?

[matteodisabatino]

Hi,
I made a module in which I use release-it (via Github Actions) to create release and tag but not for publish to npm. Here the code:

name: CI

on:
  push:
    branches: [master]

jobs:
  release:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Use Node.js 14
        uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: "14"
      - name: git config
        run: |
          git config user.email "matteo.di.sabatino.1989@gmail.com"
          git config user.name "Matteo Di Sabatino"
      - run: npm i
      - run: npm test
      - run: npm run release
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

## Other jobs down there

The job work fine but I cannot understand why I need to run "git config" if there is an access token. Note that "secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN" is a special access token, generated by CI directly, that owns all permission in the repo; if I use an access token of mine (that I called "secrets.AT") there is no change: I always have to make "git config".

I would like to know if this is normal or if I'm missing something. And if this is the correct behaviour, I would like to know if there is a clean way that let me avoid specify my personal information (although they are public).

Thanks in advance.

[webpro]

This information is needed to assign the git commit to a user. If it's not configured by the CI environment, or if the CI git user is not the user you want to assign to this release commit, you would need to change it. You could also do something like this (not sure about the exact variable names):

git config --global user.name "${CI_USERNAME}"
git config --global user.email "${CI_EMAIL}"

The above is only relevant to the Git repository (commit/tag/push). On the other hand, the GITHUB_TOKEN is indeed enough for the GitHub Release, which is done using the GitHub API.

[matteodisabatino]

Thank you very much 😀. Later i check which variables are available in github actions.

[matteodisabatino]

It seems that in Github actions the best practice is use this:

git config --global user.name "${GITHUB_ACTOR}"
git config --global user.email "${GITHUB_ACTOR}@users.noreply.github.com"

I'll try and I'll let you know 😉

[webpro]

Thanks @matteodisabatino, please let me know so we can update the docs.

[matteodisabatino]

@webpro I confirm that with the above settings the CI works (CI settings, the release). Notice that I haven't used the option "--global".

Notice also that this a test repo has been created for this purpose only. I'll delete it very soon, probably at the end of the day.

[morpheus65535]

New syntax seems to be ${{github.actor}}.