The SIMS Portal connects to the GitHub API to handle several different data flows, including adding people to the SIMS Organization in order to see and interact with project Kanban boards. Access control is handled with fine-grained tokens, and these expire after a year. Portal admins will need to periodically regenerate these tokens to ensure that tasks can be downloaded and new members are automatically invited to the organization on GitHub—new users are added to the organization when they update their SIMS Portal profile with their GitHub usernames.
To generate a new token, a user that is listed as an owner of the SIMS organization needs to follow these steps:
- Log into GitHub and click on your avatar at the top right.
- Select Settings then Developer Settings.
- Under Personal Access Tokens, click Fine-Grained Tokens.
- You should see the token that has already expired or is about to expire if you are logged in as the user that last generated a token for this. If not, then you won’t see anything (unless you’ve created these for other projects).
- Click Generate New Token. Give it a name like “SIMS Portal” or similar, then set the expiration one year from now.
- Under Resource Owner, be sure to select Surge-Information-Management-Support. If you don’t see that option, then you need to be added as an owner of the organization or have an existing owner follow these steps.
- Under Permissions, be sure to select at least Administration, Members, Projects, Custom Properties, and Custom Repository Rules. If the application logs throw any permission errors later on, you may need to add additional permissions.
- Save the token, then copy it from the confirmation screen.
Once you have a new token, you will need to update your .env file in your local development environment, as well as in production. See this article for more information on that process.