git clone failed when running in private repo

[frederikheld]

Hey @reuixiy,

thank you very much for the great work you have done with this action!

I have an issue with it though: I'm running it within an private repo and push the results to a public repo from where it is served via github actions. The action runs and pushes the results to the public repo, but I can only find XML files there. If I run the same build locally, I get the html and xml files. After some research, I found this issue:

[...]
Cloning into 'site'...
Warning: Permanently added the RSA host key for IP address 'x.x.x.x to the list of known hosts.
ERROR: Repository not found.
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.
Start building sites … 
WARN 2020/11/14 23:25:59 found no layout file for "HTML" for kind "page": You should create a template file which matches Hugo Layouts Lookup Rules for this combination.
[...]

As the generated XML files contain information from my repository (so the checkout of the main repo seems to work), I suspect that the action can't checkout the theme submodule (which is a public repo). This would explain the WARN's (this is only one of many) about missing layout files.

I found tons of discussions about the fact that actions/checkout@v2 has issues checking out private submodules. The solution is to add a personal access token. But the submodule I'm trying to clone is public (so it should be accessible) and belongs to someone I don't know, so I don't have the option to get an access token. I also don't know if I need actions/checkout@v2 at all, as your action has it's own checkout routine. So I'm a bit lost here...

Do you have any idea how I can fix this?

Thanks in advance,
Fred

[frederikheld]

It happened as it always does: short after I posted the above question (which I did after 3 hours of research), I found a working solution: I added the following step before your script.

      # Checks-out the repository under $GITHUB_WORKSPACE, so the job can access it
      - name: 'Checkout Repository'
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          submodules: true

Your action still fails to clone the submodules but it doesn't matter as it was already done in the step before. So the output looks like now:

[...]
ERROR: Repository not found.
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.
Start building sites … 
[...]

So no errors about missing layout files anymore :-)

I suggest that you remove the cloning step from your action and suggest the above step in the docs instead.

Cheers
Fred

[reuixiy]

Hey @frederikheld,

Sorry for the inconvenience and delay.

Cloning into 'site'...
Warning: Permanently added the RSA host key for IP address 'x.x.x.x to the list of known hosts.
ERROR: Repository not found.
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

So as the log you pasted shows, it's a permission issue caused by your main repo, which is a private repo, as you said.

Unfortunately, this action does not support private repo yet. But I'm glad that you have found the workaround :)

And thanks for your suggestion, but I may not replace the cloning step in entrypoint.sh with checkout action in workflow file. Since the reason I wrote this instead of using other existing actions is to keep everything simple (and runs on Arch Linux, YES!), which means no more other dependencies should be imported.

Though, I do should put some words about this in README.md. But time is not on my side recently... I just pinned this issue for temporarily. Feel free to fork this repo and improve the docs then submit a pull request if you wish.

Thanks!