Issue

• How to store credentials of a GitHub “User X” in Jenkins?
• Which scopes does an API token need for executing certain tasks in Jenkins?

Environment

• Jenkins GitHub Webhook
• GitHub OAuth Plugin

Resolution

Context: Jenkins with GitHub

Introduction to GitHub Permissions

Within in a Organization, each Repository defines its restrictions by Permission associated to Team/s and Collaborator/s.

• There are 2 Roles within a GitHub Organization: Owner or Member.
• A GitHub user becomes a Member by “joining” an Organization (by default). Note: An invitation from an Owner is needed before hand.
• Members within an GitHub Organization can be distributed in Teams. A member can join one or more teams.
• Collaborators (members or external user from the organization) and teams can be defined for each repository. For each of them should be assigned a Permission Level

As a summary: Repository permission levels for an organization.

GitHub Credentials for Jenkins

It depends on the specific configuration:

Checkout Credentials

• On GitHub, a user with Read permission is enough.
• On Jenkins, it supports Username with Password credentials. Username is the GitHub user ID and Password is the Password or a personal API Token (recommended).

Scan Credentials: For GitHub and Jenkins API interactions.

• On GitHub, it depends on the interaction. For webhooks Admin permissions are required at the repository level but Owner role is required to create it at Organization level; For updating commit statuses / reading the list of collaborators, Write permission is required.
• On Jenkins, it can be stored as: (1) Username with Password (Password: personal API Token) at Job Configuration (Multibranch Pipelines and GitHub Organization Folder) or (2) Secret text type (Secret: personal API Token) at GitHub plugin configuration.

Pull Request and Push Permissions

• To be able to create a Pull Request in “repoX”, a users needs to be granted at least with Read permissions. (actually the Read permission is required to be able to create a fork)
• To be able to commit changes to “repoX”, a users needs to be granted at least with Write permissions.

GitHub API token scopes for Jenkins

Jenkins’ scope requirements depends on the task/s you wish like to perform:

• admin:repo_hook - For managing hooks at GitHub Repositories level including for Multibranch Pipeline
• admin:org_hook - For managing hooks at GitHub Organizations level for GitHub Organization Folders
• repo - to see private repos. Please note that this is a parent scope, allowing full control of private repositories that includes:
  • repo:status - to manipulate commit statuses
  • repo:???repo_deployment - to manipulate deployment statuses
  • repo:??????public_repo - to access to public repositories
• read:org and user:email - recommended minimum for GitHub OAuth Plugin scopes.