Failing to load permissions for repo

[bncer]

Command cargo run ... building, but fails on running:

2025-11-23T22:05:41.099116Z ERROR bors: Error: Failed to load repository bncer/boring-test: Cannot load repository Some("bncer/boring-test"): Could not load permissions for r
epository bncer/boring-test

Caused by:
    Cannot load review users: Cannot load users from team API: reqwest::Error { kind: Status(404, None), url: "https://team-api.infra.rust-lang.org/v1/permissions/bors.boring_test.review.json" }

boring_test - it's my github repo to test bors

It's because permissions/bors.rust.review.json does not exist for dev environment and json doesn't contain other contributors github UserId.

@Kobzol Can I work on that?
What method do you suggest to handle local development?

[bncer]

Also some pain generates setting up bors first time on --private-key "$PRIVATE_KEY" because private-key requests to contain \n in one line: \n-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----\n........\n

Maybe it's the reason some people disappear trying to work on some issues :)

[Kobzol]

RIght, yeah, I use a bors_kindergarten test repo, and that one exists in the main database, but it's indeed an issue for local testing. Not sure what is the easiest fix, perhaps have some environment variable like OVERRIDE_PERMISSIONS=foo=review,bar=try, which will set up permissions that contain the specified users, and wouldn't try to load data from the team API 🤔 It would only be applied in debug mode, just to make sure. Would you like to work on that?

The "cleanest" option would be to allow redirecting the URL of the team API and then creating custom team API contents, but that's quite a lot of work for the user to do, the above would be much simpler.

Regarding the private key, it is something that I ran into with my IDE (IntelliJ) too. But setting export PRIVATE_KEY=... in the cmdline should work fine. Do you have any concrete suggestions we could add to README to make this easier for others?

[bncer]

I want to propose some complicated solution:
What if I create a folder and within the folder will be one file like: bors.permission.template.json with content "github_ids": []" which I will push to git.

When a person wants to run in local environment export ENVIRONMENT='local'.
And check if (bors.{repo}.try.json and bors.{repo}.review.json) exist I take it to return from function load_users else files does not exist I create from Github installations UserId. I put these files in .gitignore.

With this solution it's easier for user to change files to include people, flexible to make changes if ENVIRONMENT will be different for staging and production.

[Kobzol]

Maybe it's better to reuse the existing code for JSON permissions parsing than writing a custom parser only for local execution, yeah.

Sounds reasonable. So what about this?

1. Create a directory called data/permissions, which will have two example JSON files for try and review permissions
2. Add something like enum TeamSource { Url(String), Directory(String) } and teach TeamApiClient to load the JSON files also from disk
3. Add an optional CLI parameter to bors, such as --permissions=<url>. The default value would be https://team-api.infra.rust-lang.org. If the URL starts with http, we will assume that it's a network resource, otherwise we assume directory. Pass this value to the constructor of TeamApiClient created in try_main.
4. Document in docs/development.md how to work with permissions locally.

[bncer]

I will make as soon as I have a time