Control email of github-actions bot?

[mgeisler]

Hello! I found this GH action recently and I would love to use it in my repository: google/comprehensive-rust#2396.

However, I've run into a small problem: we use a CLA bot to ensure that we have the correct paperwork for everybody who contributes to the repository. It seems we don't have this for the github-actions user which becomes a co-author of the PR:

I will try to talk with the people in Google who maintain the CLA bot about this — I just wanted to note the issue and ask if you perhaps know of a way to control the email address used? Perhaps it would be possible to post the comment as a different user completely?

Ah, reading a bit more lead me to this discussion — the email address used it the same for all actions done by the bot. So I guess this would have to be handled on our side.

[mgeisler]

actions/stale#61 (comment) seems to answer my first question — it would be possible to use a different bot user by changing the token used.

[parkerbxyz]

it would be possible to use a different bot user by changing the token used

Yes, that's right. The default token used is GITHUB_TOKEN. You can use a different token with the token input. I recommend using a GitHub App token in this case. Here's an example:

jobs:
  suggest-changes:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Generate token
        id: generate-token
        uses: actions/create-github-app-token@v1
        with:
          app-id: ${{ vars.APP_ID }}
          private-key: ${{ secrets.APP_PRIVATE_KEY }}
      - name: Suggest changes
        uses: parkerbxyz/suggest-changes@v1
        with:
          token: ${{ steps.generate-token.outputs.token }}

Let me know if that answers your questions or if you have any additional questions. 🙂

[mgeisler]

Thanks for the help, I'll talk with our admins to see if I can create and install such an app.