gh_pat: Retrieve GitHub personal access token.

Description

Consults environment variables for a GitHub personal access token (PAT). By default, looks for GITHUB_PAT and GITHUB_TOKEN, in that order. Conventions followed by other packages at the time of writing: git2r and devtools look for GITHUB_PAT, gh looks for GITHUB_TOKEN. Obtain a PAT from https://github.com/settings/tokens. Unless you have a specific reason to request otherwise, the default scopes are probably sufficient.

Usage

gh_pat(envvar = c("GITHUB_PAT", "GITHUB_TOKEN"))

Arguments

envvar

Name of the environment variable in which the GitHub personal access token is stored. Can be a character vector, with names in order of preference.

Value

The GitHub personal access token, invisibly.

Details

How to store your PAT in an environment variable?

Identify your home directory. Not sure? Enter normalizePath("~/") in the R console.

If you don't already have a file here named .Renviron, create one. If you have one already, open it for editing.

Add a line like this: GITHUB_PAT=blahblahblahblahblahblah, where blahblahblahblahblahblah is your PAT. Make sure the last line in the file is empty. Otherwise R will silently fail to load the file. Save. And yes you do want to use a filename that begins with a dot.

Restart R. .Renviron is processed only during Startup.

Check your work with Sys.getenv("GITHUB_PAT"). Your PAT should print to screen.

Examples

Run this code

## by default, the PAT is not printed to screen
gh_pat()

## if you really want to see it, surround the call with extra parentheses
(gh_pat())

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