Assigning permissions to jobs

Note: GitHub-hosted runners are not currently supported on GitHub Enterprise Server. You can see more information about planned future support on the GitHub public roadmap.

Overview

You can use permissions to modify the default permissions granted to the GITHUB_TOKEN, adding or removing access as required, so that you only allow the minimum required access. For more information, see "Automatic token authentication."

You can use permissions either as a top-level key, to apply to all jobs in the workflow, or within specific jobs. When you add the permissions key within a specific job, all actions and run commands within that job that use the GITHUB_TOKEN gain the access rights you specify. For more information, see jobs.<job_id>.permissions.

Available scopes and access values:

permissions:
  actions: read|write|none
  checks: read|write|none
  contents: read|write|none
  deployments: read|write|none
  issues: read|write|none
  discussions: read|write|none
  packages: read|write|none
  pages: read|write|none
  pull-requests: read|write|none
  repository-projects: read|write|none
  security-events: read|write|none
  statuses: read|write|none

If you specify the access for any of these scopes, all of those that are not specified are set to none.

You can use the following syntax to define read or write access for all of the available scopes:

permissions: read-all|write-all

You can use the following syntax to disable permissions for all of the available scopes:

permissions: {}

You can use the permissions key to add and remove read permissions for forked repositories, but typically you can't grant write access. The exception to this behavior is where an admin user has selected the Send write tokens to workflows from pull requests option in the GitHub Actions settings. For more information, see "Managing GitHub Actions settings for a repository."

Example: Assigning permissions to GITHUB_TOKEN

This example shows permissions being set for the GITHUB_TOKEN that will apply to all jobs in the workflow. All permissions are granted read access.

name: "My workflow"

on: [ push ]

permissions: read-all

jobs:
  ...

Assigning permissions to a specific job

For a specific job, you can use jobs.<job_id>.permissions to modify the default permissions granted to the GITHUB_TOKEN, adding or removing access as required, so that you only allow the minimum required access. For more information, see "Automatic token authentication."

By specifying the permission within a job definition, you can configure a different set of permissions for the GITHUB_TOKEN for each job, if required. Alternatively, you can specify the permissions for all jobs in the workflow. For information on defining permissions at the workflow level, see permissions.