Error: Command failed: git push heroku HEAD:refs/heads/main --force

Error I received

My file:

name: Deploy

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Install packages
        run: npm install
      - name: Build project
        run: npm run-script build
      - uses: akhileshns/heroku-deploy@v3.12.12 # This is the action
        with:
          heroku_api_key: ${{secrets.HEROKU_API_KEY}}
          heroku_app_name: ${{secrets.HEROKU_APP_NAME}} #Must be unique in Heroku
          heroku_email: ${{secrets.HEROKU_EMAIL}}
          procfile: 'web: npm start'

[rbclark]

Interestingly for me just regenerating the deploy token fixed the problem.

[DrPep]

TL;DR: Ensure your secrets are defined and accessible.

For those of you discovering this issue today, I had the same problem. I determined it was being caused by the HEROKU_API_KEY not being defined in secrets for the repository. The error message is something of a misnomer as it shows successfully logged into heroku in the output, despite that clearly not being the case (in our instance).

HTH