GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN should not be an environmental variable?

[cboettig]

A pull request could add the command echo $GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN and expose the token. Even if you are only using in private repositories, I don't think it is desirable to so directly expose a private token to collaborators.

Perhaps there's a way to still make the token available to entrypoint.sh without making it visible as an env var on the runner?

I second this. I had to rotate my token today because of Codecov.io's recent security incident which potentially exposed this token.
Would it be sensible to bind a .env file containing the token into the container to get the token from there?

[cboettig]

My current approach has been to comment out the execution of entrypoint.sh in the Dockerfile,

docker-github-runner/docker/Dockerfile

Line 88 in 21400f7

ENTRYPOINT ["/entrypoint.sh"]

and avoid providing the secure credentials in an environmental variable at run time. Once the container is up, I docker exec into it, run entrypoint.sh manually with the credentials. This way, these credentials are not stored as env var that could be accidentally exposed.

I'm not a security expert, and there may be other routes which are more streamlined and/or more secure than this, but at least I think it's better than embedding the private token so directly.