Automatic citations not working when doing a pull request from a fork

[vincerubinetti]

Several people have had trouble with automatic citations when doing PRs from forks:

greenelab/greenelab.com#45
#96

Auto-citations is the main feature of the template, so these issues are unacceptable.

This appears to be some kind of permissions issue. When you open a pull request from a fork, that is essentially a third party stranger on GitHub that is trying to trigger a GitHub Actions workflow in your website repo that commits directly to it.

I've tried many things in the past to solve this, but nothing seems to work consistently. The solution may end up being that we tell people you must do PRs from branches, not forks. I'd rather have a strict limitation that works 100% of the time than a more flexible one that fails inconsistently and inexplicably.

[vincerubinetti]

I've tried many things.

• Alternatives to stefanzweifel/git-auto-commit-action
• stefanzweifel/git-auto-commit-action options
• pull_request and/or pull_request_target triggers
• GitHub repo settings

None have seemed to work consistently. I must unfortunately conclude that, at least for now, we have to just say that automatic citations only work from a branch.