Error "403" when accessing GitHub APIs from Bitbucket Pipelines

Summary

When attempting to access GitHub APIs from Bitbucket Pipelines, one may encounter "403" errors. An example of this can be seen below, where an attempt to update a Helm project failed with the following error:

Solution

GitHub has implemented rate limiting for their API calls to ensure fair usage. The rate limits for GitHub API calls are as follows:

1. User Access Token Requests are limited to 5,000 requests per hour.

2. User Access Token Requests have a higher limit of 15,000 for enterprise customers.

3. For unauthenticated requests, the rate limit allows for up to 60 requests per hour. Unauthenticated requests are associated with the originating IP address, not the person making requests.

In cases where API requests are being made without authentication, there are chances of hitting the rate limit if the request count exceeds 60 within an hour. The recommended solution to avoid rate-limiting issues when accessing GitHub APIs from Bitbucket Pipelines is to authenticate using their tokens. By authenticating with tokens, one can increase the request limit to 5,000 per hour and prevent rate limiting.