Managing Secrets Within Github Actions

Pavol Kutaj

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2 min read

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Feb 17, 2021

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• The aim of this tutorial🔍 is a successful setup of secrets to authenticate a request to Zendesk Help Center API

1. Secret creation

• Open repo
• Go to Settings → Secrets → Add a new secret
• Enter secret name
• Enter secret value
• Select Add secret

• Open workflow file .\github\workflows\mail.yaml
• Add to the step (you can also add this to different levels of the workflow)

• the whole workflow that checks out my private repo, runs a publish script located in that repo, and then checks in changes done by that script look as follows

2. what are secrets

• encrypted environment variables to be used in workflows

3. how do you make a secret available to an action?

• either set as input in a workflow file (not covered here)
• or set as an environment variable in a workflow file

4. github token

• a secret automatically generated
• can be used in a workflow
• this is an access token that you can use to authenticate on behalf of the GitHub App installed on your repo responsible for running actions
• constraint: only your repo
• same as with other secrets, you need to refer it within the workflow file to make authenticated GitHub API calls with

• usecases: running automated github workflows for features within github (adding labels, creating issues, etc)

5. list used sources

• Getting Started with GitHub Actions