Colab can't save changes to GitHub PUBLIC and PRIVATE reports

Question

Colab cannot save to any of my GitHub repos regardless whether they are public or private. The error I get:

You do not have permission to save this notebook. To keep your changes, make a copy of the notebook.

State:

• Both my Google and GitHub accounts are standard accounts.

• I have approved and authorized Colab with GitHub access.

• I have "Access private repositories and organisations" ticked.

• I have Adblock Plus disabled for the Colab site.

• I have all permissions to the site set to either Ask(default) or Allow(default) and I even changed Pop-ups and redirects to Allow.

• The browser I use is Chrome (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6), but I have also tried it in Firefox and on a different computer - I still get the same error.

• I have tried deleting all cookies and site data for both Colab and GitHub.

• I have tried revoking GitHub access from Colab and requesting it again.

Workflows to reproduce bug:

• File -> Open notebook -> GitHub tab -> select a PUBLIC repository -> Try to save -> Get error: "You do not have permission to save this notebook. To keep your changes, make a copy of the notebook."

• File -> Open notebook -> GitHub tab -> select a PRIVATE repository -> Try to save -> Get error: "You do not have permission to save this notebook. To keep your changes, make a copy of the notebook."

I tried creating a new notebook in Colab and saving it to GitHub - this works, it commits it to the repo, however when I open the newly notebook created book in Colab I get the same error "You do not have permission to save this notebook. To keep your changes, make a copy of the notebook.".

Here are more details and things I have tried to troubleshoot:

• Link to a minimal, public, self-contained notebook that reproduces this issue: https://github.com/atkuzmanov/googcol-test-1

• I was a member of an organization in GitHub, of which I do not have rights to modify the organization's settings. I thought this might cause problems, so despite me not wanting to do it, I left the organisation and it got removed my account. I gave it more than 24h in case it needs to converge but this did not fix the issue, I still get the same error.

• I had applied and received approval for GitHub sponsorship, but had not set it up, so I thought it might be causing issues. I revoked it and my GitHub sponsorship account got closed.

• I used Chrome Developer Tools to try and get some more info:

  • The only request, when I save, which gets made in the Network tab is this one:

  curl 'https://colab.research.google.com/analytics?authuser=0' \
  -H 'authority: colab.research.google.com' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua: " Not A;Brand";v="99", "Chromium";v="96", "Google Chrome";v="96"' \
  -H 'dnt: 1' \
  -H 'content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?0' \
  -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.93 Safari/537.36' \
  -H 'x-colab-experiment: 20730102,20730120' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua-platform: "macOS"' \
  -H 'accept: */*' \
  -H 'origin: https://colab.research.google.com' \
  -H 'x-client-data: CIm2yQEIprbJAQjEtskBCKmdygEIhIbLAQjq8ssBCJ75ywEI1vzLAQjnhMwBCLWFzAEIy4nMAQitjswBCNuOzAEIm4/MAQjSj8wBCNmQzAEYjp7LAQ==' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-site: same-origin' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-mode: cors' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-dest: empty' \
  -H 'referer: https://colab.research.google.com/' \
  -H 'accept-language: en-GB,en;q=0.9,bg-BG;q=0.8,bg;q=0.7,en-US;q=0.6' \
  -H 'cookie: [XXX-SANITIZED-XXX]' \
  --data-raw     '{"notebook_name":"Untitled1.ipynb","notebook_id":"https://github.com/atkuzman        ov/googcol-test-1/blob/main/Untitled1.ipynb","colab_version_tag":"colab-    20211215-060053-RC00_416524343","session_id":1625868743325649,"user_action":    {"action":"save","source":1}}' \
  --compressed
  

  And this request gets:

  Request URL: https://colab.research.google.com/analytics?authuser=0
  Request Method: POST
  Status Code: 204 
  

What new things could I try? At this point, even only being able to save to public repos would be great!

Answer 1

I also opened an issue in GitHub and I got a reply:

Unfortunately, I suspect you're just running into an issue of bad UX on our side. In order to save back to GitHub you always have to use "Save a copy in GitHub". Colab doesn't yet support auto-save or Ctrl+S saving back to GitHub because it requires making a commit back to the repo but it's a bit misleading that the intended save flow looks like it's making another copy. So, work-around is "Save a copy in GitHub" -- hopefully that works for you for now.

Reference

GitHub issue: Colab can't save changes to GitHub public and private reports #2518

I have replied and asked if this is already a feature they have in mind and if not if we can make it a feature request.

I guess we can hope that this gets implemented soon and in the mean time we can use the suggested workaround "Save a copy in GitHub".

I also hope this serves as information to anybody that stubmles on the same pitfall as myself.