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GitHub — Fine-grained PAT for Per-repo Access Control

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GitHub — Fine-grained PAT for Per-repo Access Control

How to give Claude Code (or any tool) read-only access to specific GitHub repos while keeping full access to others, using fine-grained Personal Access Tokens.

Why / When to Use

Use when working in a multi-repo workspace and you want to allow Claude Code to read but not push to certain repositories (e.g., vendor repos, reference codebases, sensitive configs).

Core Concept / Commands

Step 1 — Create a fine-grained PAT

  1. GitHub → Settings → Developer settings → Personal access tokens → Fine-grained tokens
  2. Create a token scoped to specific repositories
  3. Set permissions per-repo:
    • Read-only repo: Contents: Read-only
    • Full-access repo: Contents: Read and write

Step 2 — Configure git remotes to use different tokens

# Read-only repo — use read-only token
git remote set-url origin https://<READ_ONLY_TOKEN>@github.com/user/repo-a.git
 
# Full access repo — use full token
git remote set-url origin https://<FULL_TOKEN>@github.com/user/repo-b.git

Key Options / Variants

Two-layer read-only enforcement (stronger)

Fine-grained PAT alone only blocks remote pushes. Claude Code can still edit files locally. To block local edits too, combine with:

# Block all local writes to the repo directory
chmod -R a-w /path/to/read-only-repo/
 
# Or use Claude Code's settings.json deny rules
LayerWhat it blocks
Fine-grained PATgit push rejected by GitHub (403)
chmod -R a-w / settings.jsonLocal file edits blocked by OS/Claude

Gotchas

  • PAT is embedded in the remote URL — don’t commit .git/config to version control
  • chmod -R a-w is aggressive; undo with chmod -R u+w when you need to update the repo manually
  • Fine-grained PATs have an expiry date — set a calendar reminder to rotate

Source

Conversation: “Multiple GitHub repositories in one workspace” — 2026-05-18

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