Enable actions via API for forked repos

[salyh]

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I maintain an organization with a lot of forked repos in it. All repos are public. For forked repos actions are disabled by default as this page says:

I am now looking for an API where I can enable them (the API analogy of pressing the green "I understand my workflows, go ahead and enable them" button). To me it looks like there is no such API :-(

Because I have a lot of repos I don't want to enable all of them via the UI but automate the process. The fork API has also no property like "enable_workflows" but it should have one (with a default value of false).

Doe anyone has a solution or a idea how to solve this?

[dheshalj]

To enable actions via API for forked repositories in GitHub, you might need to use the GitHub REST API to interact with repository settings.

Firstly generate a Personal Access Token: "Developer settings" > "Personal access tokens" and generate a new token with the necessary scopes (e.g., repo or workflow).

You'll need to send a PUT request to the repository's settings endpoint with the appropriate payload.

curl -X PUT \
  -H "Authorization: token YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN" \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json" \
  https://api.github.com/repos/:owner/:repo/actions/enable

Replace YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN with your personal access token, :owner with the owner of the forked repository, and :repo with the name of the forked repository.

Note
Check fork permissions before enabling actions for a forked repository via API, ensure that you have the necessary permissions. Typically, you need admin access to the repository or organization.

[salyh]

That is not working, 404 is returned. Permissions are double checked!

According to https://raw.githubusercontent.com/github/rest-api-description/main/descriptions/ghes-3.9/ghes-3.9.2022-11-28.yaml there is no such api (therefore i asked this question)

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[I0x0I]

It seems running gh api --method PUT -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" -H "X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28" /repos/OWNER/REPO/actions/workflows/main.yml/enable returns nothing and does not enable the workflow at the moment.

[nilsreichardt]

The following API endpoints enables GitHub Actions on a fork:

curl -X PUT \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GITHUB_TOKEN" \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
  https://api.github.com/repos/OWNER/REPO/actions/permissions \
  -d '{
    "enabled": true
  }'

See https://docs.github.com/en/rest/actions/permissions?apiVersion=2022-11-28#set-github-actions-permissions-for-a-repository