Personal Access Token
This guide was tested last time on April 7, 2025.
To open, comment and close issues on GitHub, you need a fine-grained personal access token (PAT).
If you use a PAT linked with your account, you will not receive GitHub notifications for issue actions performed by DownstreamTester. However, you are allowed to setup a machine user account, as stated in the Github Docs.
Generating a new token
Log in to the account for which you want to generate the token and go to https://github.com/settings/personal-access-tokens and click on Generate new token.
Choose a Token name which makes sense to you, e.g. DownstreamTester issues.
If you want to use the token in a GitHub organization, be sure to select the organization as Resource owner.
Choose an Expiration date that is convenient for you, but keep in mind that regular renewal of tokens is recommended.
To be able to open issue Repository access has to be set to All repositories or Only select repositories. Then, the category Repository permissions will be available. Expand that category and set Issues to Read and write
This will automatically enable read access to Metadata, which is mandatory for opening issues.
Click on Generate token at the bottom, which opens a popup to show you all selected permissions, which should be
- Issues (Read and write)
- Metadata (Read-only)
Click on Generate token again and copy the token and/or keep the tab open for now.
Adding the token as a secret
There are two options for setting up the secret, for a single repository or for a whole organization. This depends on where you want to use DownstreamTester.
For a single repository
Go to Settings > Secrets and variables > actions
Click on New repository secret, choose a name that makes sense to you, e.g. ISSUETOKEN and add the PAT under Secret
For an organization
Go to Settings > Secrets and variables > actions
Click on New organization secret, choose a name that makes sense to you, e.g. ISSUETOKEN and add the PAT under Value. By default the secret will be accessible by GitHub actions in all public repositories. Private repositories only have GitHub actions available on paid plans.
You can also choose selected repositories and then select specific repositories by clicking on the cogwheel.