Automate the approval of fine grained Personal Access Tokens in GitHub. You can now define a maximum duration for fine grained PAT and automatically approve or reject them.
Note
Organization admins can still create long lived PATs.
- Install the application from my staging environment onto your organization and authorize it to access the
.github-private
repository. The application is only authorized to access thegh-patrol.yaml
file, nothing else. - Restrict the Personal access token settings of your organization so that only fine grained tokens are allowed and require administrator authorization.
- Create a
gh-patrol.yaml
file in the.github-private
repository of your organization with a content similar to the following:
- name: trusted users
users:
- user1
- user2
max_duration: 2
- name: super trusted users
users:
- user3
- user4
max_duration: 5
- name: other users
users:
- all
max_duration: 1
Users now need to create a fine grained PAT with a short enough duration. When a user requests a personal access token, the application will check the gh-patrol.yaml
file to determine the maximum duration of the token. If the user is not listed in the file, the token will be granted for a maximum of 1 day. If the user is listed in the file, the token will be granted for the maximum duration specified in the file. When their token expires, users need to log back to the GitHub website and regenerate the token. It will go through the same approval process and its value will change.
Cloning repos using git clone https://[email protected]/<your organization>/<your repo>
.
Warning
Users still can use SSH keys to clone repos without the need for a PAT. If you want to enforce the use of PATs, you need to force the use of HTTPS URLs in your organization. Currently, the only way to do this is:
- use a VPN and block the SSH port
- configure IP allow lists in your organization to force the use of the VPN
Create a clone of this repository and follow the instructions below to deploy your own instance of GitHub Patrol.
Create an Azure Function App. You will need to downlaod the publish profile from the Azure Portal.
The deployment workflow needs to authenticate with Azure to deploy the Azure Function App. This is done using OIDC. Follw the instructions here to configure the OIDC authentication and note the following values: AZURE_CLIENT_ID
, AZURE_TENANT_ID
, AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID
.
Create a GitHub App with the following settings:
- URL:
https://<function>.azurewebsites.net/api/webhook
- Secret: generate a secret for this, for instance using
openssl rand -hex 20
. It will be used as the environment variable and Actions secretWEBHOOK_SECRET
- Single file:
read
and path: 'gh-patrol.yaml'
- Personal access token requests:
read & write
- Personal access token request
- Choose
Any account
to use this app for multiple organizations.
After creating the app, note the App ID and download the private key.
WEBHOOK_SECRET
- The secret used to sign the webhook payload.APP_ID
- The GitHub App ID.AZURE_FUNCTIONS_ENVIRONMENT
- Set toDevelopment
when running locally to bypass the need for a Webhook Secret.PRIVATE_KEY_FILE
- The path to the private key file for the GitHub App when running locally. Use this instead ofPRIVATE_KEY
when developping locally.
WEBHOOK_SECRET
- The secret used to sign the webhook payload.PRIVATE_KEY
- The base64 enconding of the private key file for the GitHub App. Use the output of the following command as the value.
base64 -i <your app>.private-key.pem
AZURE_FUNCTIONAPP_PUBLISH_PROFILE
- The publish profile downloaded from the Azure Function App within the Azure Portal.
APP_ID
- The GitHub App ID.
AZURE_CLIENT_ID
- The client ID of the Azure Service Principal.AZURE_TENANT_ID
- The tenant ID of the Azure Service Principal.AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID
- The subscription ID of the Azure Service Principal.
AZURE_RESOURCE_GROUP
- The resource group of the Azure Function App.AZURE_FUNCTION_APP_NAME
- The name of the Azure Function App.
- Run from the debugger or the Azure plugin in VSCode or run
npm start
from the terminal. - Call the ping service from the terminal with the following command:
curl http://localhost:7071/api/ping
- Run from the debugger or the Azure plugin in VSCode or run
npm start
from the terminal. - Run ngrok from the terminal with the following command:
ngrok http 7071 --domain your-domain.ngrok.dev
Call the ping service from the terminal with the following command:
curl https://your-domain.ngrok.dev/api/ping