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What chronik reads on GitHub

What chronik reads on GitHub

chronik asks for two repository permissions and one account permission. Nothing else, and this page says what each one is for so the decision can be made before you install rather than after.

Repository access

metadata:read

Every GitHub App is required to have this. It is what lets an app see that a repository exists at all — its name, its owner, whether it is private. chronik uses it to show you the list you pick from when you make a rule.

contents:read

This is what makes a release announcement possible. Release notes are content, and without this permission a release arrives as a name with nothing under it.

It is also the only permission that reaches anything you have written. It grants read access to the repository's files, and chronik reads exactly one thing with it: the body of a release. It does not clone, it does not walk the tree, and it does not read source files.

Account access

email addresses:read

Used once, at sign-in, to pre-fill your address so you do not type it. chronik never stores a GitHub user token — the address is read at that moment and the token is discarded.

What chronik does not ask for

  • No write access of any kind. chronik cannot push, cannot open an issue, cannot change a setting, and cannot create a release.
  • No issues, no pull requests, no actions, no packages, no deployments.
  • No organization membership or team data.

This is worth comparing before you install. An app that asks for more than it needs is not necessarily doing anything with the surplus — but the surplus is what it could do, and that is the part you are agreeing to.

Watching a branch is a separate decision

If you switch a rule to watch commits on a branch, no new permission is requested — contents:read already covers it. What changes is who reads what: commit subject lines written for colleagues start appearing in a chat channel, and the people in that channel may be a wider set than the people who can see the repository. chronik asks you to confirm that in as many words before the switch takes effect.