Back to the blog entries•Light theme•Dark theme

Fixing "Resource not available" in GitHub Actions

Published on May 5, 2023

The "Resource not available" error occurs when you try to use a GitHub Token for some GitHub API call, but the call fails because the token does not have the necessary permissions.

Let's walk through the real-world scenario which inspired this post. A default token is available to each GitHub Action as ${{ github.token }}. I tried to use that token to delete my action's cache, like so:

1  - name: Clean up the cache
2    env:
3      GH_TOKEN: ${{ github.token }}
4    run: |
5      gh extension install actions/gh-actions-cache
6      gh actions-cache delete --confirm $CACHE_KEY

That attempt failed with the "Resource not available" error because the token does have the permission to delete the cache by default. I fixed the problem by adding the required permission to the job's definition:

1jobs:
2  my-custom-job:
3    permissions:
4      actions: write       # used to clean up the cache

If you run into that problem, the solution is to define which permissions your token needs and add them, as done above.

That being said, how would you figure out which permissions are needed for your scenario? Unfortunately, I do not have a precise procedure for that. I usually try to infer the required permissions by picking apart the API URLs used in the action. As an example, in this case I searched through the GitHub Rest API documentation for the API URL used to delete the cache, which is:

[DELETE] https://api.github.com/repos/$OWNER/$REPO/actions/caches?key=$CACHE_KEY