Generating a user access token for GitHub Apps that are already installed

[betterengineering]

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Background

My company has a website builder product with a GitHub App that allows customers to modify their website. Our GitHub App is setup to generate a user access token when a user installs our app. We have a 1:1 mapping between a user access token and a website in our system. However, our users can have multiple websites and need to link their GitHub account to any website they wish to modify. To support this flow, our GitHub App is configured to Redirect on update to complete the OAuth2 flow if the GitHub App is already installed.

Our GitHub App setup:

• We have Request user authorization (OAuth) during installation enabled
• We have the Redirect on update enabled

Bug

This flow has been working for several months until today when users with multiple websites see the following error when saving an existing installation:

Cannot change repository selection from 'all' to 'all'

Help Wanted

Can the change to enforce a new selection be reverted so that a customer can save a GitHub App installation with all repositories selected and complete the OAuth flow? Is there another way we can support the Redirect on update workflow to generate a user access token when a user connects a new website to an existing GitHub App installation?

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[rmccue]

Has anyone found an effective workaround for this? We have similar behaviour, where each "instance" in our application needs to be separately connected, and this change has made it impossible to connect an already-connected organisation to a new instance. This is despite GitHub Support explicitly recommending the "switch selected repos to something new and then back" workaround previously.

[betterengineering]

Hey folks! Just wanted to update this thread. We received a response from GitHub support with the following message:

The team has released a change that should resolve this issue. Can you please confirm if your users are able to generate a user access token again?

I was able to confirm the change resolved this issue and users are now able to save existing installations to complete the OAuth2 redirect, even if there is no change in the selection.

[rmccue]

Thanks for the heads up @betterengineering - confirmed the same on my side too, although still no reply back from GitHub Support to my ticket!