PEM routines:get_name:no start line

Hi, I’m trying to get this action running to use with peter-evans/create-pull-request.

I’m using it like this:

- uses: tibdex/github-app-token@v1
  id: generate-token
  with:
    app_id: ${{ secrets.PR_APP_ID }}
    private_key: ${{ secrets.PR_APP_PRIV_KEY }}

and the error is

2021-04-29T19:57:42.4816536Z ##[group]Run tibdex/github-app-token@v1
2021-04-29T19:57:42.4817128Z with:
2021-04-29T19:57:42.4817976Z   app_id: ***
2021-04-29T19:57:42.4818651Z   private_key: ***
2021-04-29T19:57:42.4819098Z ##[endgroup]
2021-04-29T19:57:42.5590518Z ##[error]Error: error:0909006C:PEM routines:get_name:no start line

I don’t have any ideas of how to debug this since I’m pretty new to using github actions. Any help would be appreciated.

[laughedelic]

This error usually means that the private key is in a wrong format. Here are a few options of what you could have done wrong:

• didn’t copy-paste the key correctly?
• Base64-encoded the key?
• downloaded the wrong kind of key? in the app settings you need to scroll all the way down and Generate a private key, not a Client secret.

When you click the generate button, you will download a .pem file, then copy-paste its content (literally, no changes) to your PR_APP_PRIV_KEY GitHub secret.

[will]

It was due to it being a private repo in a different org, so installing the app into the org and giving it the right permissions and all that fixed it. If the app you’re trying to do this with isn’t a private one, then the issue might be something different.