checkout: Permission denied when "Deleting the contents of"

I experienced the same issue. To get around this I ran a command to change file permissions right before executing actions/checkout:

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /home/github/actions-runner/_work/{REPOSITORY_NAME_HERE}

@felipecrs Something like this (runs-on must be equal):

  configure:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    outputs:
      containerUser: ${{ steps.get-user.outputs.containerUser }}
    
    steps:
      - id: get-user
        run: echo "::set-output name=containerUser::`id -u`:`id -g`"
    
    
  clone-and-install:
    
    needs: configure
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    container:
      image: mcr.microsoft.com/vscode/devcontainers/base:ubuntu
      options: --user ${{ needs.configure.outputs.containerUser }}
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2

But it is ridiculous.

I experienced the same issue. To get around this I ran a command to change file permissions right before executing actions/checkout:

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /home/github/actions-runner/_work/{REPOSITORY_NAME_HERE}

This worked for me - but I used ${{ github.workspace }} as the path

I was able to resolve this by adding this step:

- name: Chown user
  run: |
    sudo chown -R $USER:$USER $GITHUB_WORKSPACE

I was able to resolve this by adding this step:

- name: Chown user
  run: |
    sudo chown -R $USER:$USER $GITHUB_WORKSPACE

Only solution that worked for me after 12 hours of debugging.

Here is another solution that is a bit hacky but works to clean up the working directory before attempting any checkout:

jobs:
  cleanup:
    runs-on: self-hosted
    container:
      image: ubuntu:latest
    steps:
      - name: Cleaning up the $GITHUB_WORKSPACE as root from a Docker image
        # Volume auto mounted by gh actions pointing to the current working-directory
        run: find /__w/${{ github.event.repository.name }}/${{ github.event.repository.name }}/. -name . -o -prune -exec rm -rf -- {} + || true

  unit_tests:
    needs: cleanup
    name: Run the unit tests
    runs-on: self-hosted
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

  ...

Hope it helps!

You may need to specify the checkout path input to avoid the volume mount being under the repository.

The containers are setup at the beginning of the job. And git clone will fail if the directory isnt empty.

You could always symlink the dir back in place (or copy the files), if you need the data underneath the repository. Or if it’s your test data, consider updating your scripts to allow the location to be overridden using an env var.

@Yalchin403 AutoModality/action-clean@v1 action fixed this for me

I had to add “echo password” before, otherwise sudo is asking for password.

echo ${{secrets.DEPLOY_PASSWORD}} | sudo -S chown -R $USER:$USER /home/github/deployment/{REPOSITORY_NAME_HERE}

Is there a better solution?

I’m going to add a troubleshooting doc. I’ll add a section for this.

Is there any way to simply make the checkout work with containers running as non-root?

I’m trying something like:

clone-and-install:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    container:
      image: mcr.microsoft.com/vscode/devcontainers/base:ubuntu
      options: --user 1000
  steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2

and it does not work.

If I run the container as root it works by the way.

Since I could not find an issue that exactly describes the real root cause and how to solve it, I created one. I believe this can now be closed.

I believe the maintainers should close this issue since it’s not caused by this Action. And of course, point to the relevant repository.

Reading https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/434 description, I don’t think it’s so related.

Any plan on fix this, this is quite annoying since many services limit user not to be root.

@felipecrs Well, how it looks, GitHub runner, is running under user, with UID: 1001 and GID: 116 So, change it to:

clone-and-install:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    container:
      image: mcr.microsoft.com/vscode/devcontainers/base:ubuntu
      options: --user 1001
  steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2

I was not able to solve this, and instead had to stop using a container altogether. Would love a solution if anyone has one. FYI @JungHanter @ekahannes