GitHub permissions

Moderne uses a GitHub OAuth application to perform various actions on your behalf. Below is an explanation of those permissions and how they're used by Moderne.

OAuth permission

Moderne requires a select number of OAuth scopes necessary to help you transform your code.

Repositories (public)	Read/write	Create branches, create forks of public repositories, and push changesets on your behalf.
Repositories (private) (optional)	Read/write	Create branches, create forks of private repositories, and push changesets on your behalf. Only enabled if includePrivateRepos=true is set in agent configuration for GitHub. See configure an agent with github for more detail.
Organizations and teams	Read-only	Understand the organizations you belong to and your level of access within them.
Workflow	Read/write	Recipes that alter GitHub Action workflow files require this permission to make commits to them.
Personal user data	Read-only	Recognize your account as a new or returning user. Email and Profile are included by default with OpenID Connect through OAuth.

GitHub OAuth applications vs. GitHub applications

Those familiar with GitHub authentication may wonder why Moderne doesn't use GitHub apps for authentication instead of OAuth apps, since GitHub apparently favors GitHub apps as a replacement for OAuth apps. The reason Moderne is unable to use GitHub app authentication is because creating a user-owned fork of a public repository using Github app authentication requires:

• The individual user to install the GitHub app into their personal account (not just an organization they belong to).
• Permissions administration:read and administration:write must be granted.
• The GitHub application must be installed with "all repositories" access.

Creating forks of public repositories is an important workflow for Moderne, and we don't believe users should need to grant such permissive access to accomplish it. With a GitHub OAuth application, all that is necessary is the public_repo scope, which doesn't grant Moderne read and write access to all your private repositories without restriction.