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Comment by bbrunner | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there isn't any way to specifically ask for only read permissions for private repos. The commit statuses permission doesn't allow for listing of private repos either.

If I'm completely missing something than I'd be more than happy to get a change deployed.

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I wish GitHub would add more fine-grained permissions. Right now authorizing an app like this is giving away the keys to the kingdom and that's a little scary. For a similar reason we chose to run Hound (https://houndci.com/) locally instead of use the SaaS version.

> I wish GitHub would add more fine-grained permissions.

Yes, for both API and direct access. You can't allow somebody to triage bugs without giving them write access to the repository itself.

Judging by the screenshots of the product, it seems like repo:status is the permission that you should be asking for instead of repo. It's still read/write, but only to commit statuses and not code.

Is there something that your product is doing that requires read access to the code?

I tried repo:status but from my testing I wasn't able to list private repos. So even though I might be able to get their commits I had no way of discovering all of the private repos for a person/org.

I'll reinvestigate this as soon as I'm off the caltrain and have decent internet :)

I think r/w access is due to a limitation in the permissions from Github. Hopefully they will make this more fine-grained soon.

https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201824286-Why-do...

Could you ask for either public or private scope?

There doesn't seem to be such a thing in github, at least there wasn't last time I had to deal with this. If they've updated it since then that'd be awesome, but I think this is a long-standing issue.

I see, you are right you could only do ` ` to get some information and `public_repo` grants write access too.

https://developer.github.com/v3/oauth/#scopes

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