Issues with Tool Authorization: Claude pauses for approval despite using --allowedTools

[Ranzaaroor]

Hi everyone,

I’m working on a workflow where a Claude Code Action audits PR diffs and, if necessary, checks out a branch to create a new PR to master.

I'm hitting a roadblock where Claude consistently pauses to ask for manual permission to run commands like gh pr view or gh issue close, even though I have explicitly added these to the --allowedTools configuration. Since this is running in a CI environment, the process just hangs or fails because there is no way to provide manual approval.

I’ve tried:

Adding Bash(gh *) and Bash(git *) to the allowed tools.

Explicitly listing subcommands like Bash(gh issue close*).

Passing the GH_TOKEN environment variable.

Has anyone successfully implemented a fully "hands-off" automation with the GitHub CLI tools? Am I missing a specific flag to force non-interactive mode for these authorized tools?

Thanks!

[Ejb503]

The Bash(gh *) pattern in --allowedTools matches the literal command prefix, but tools like gh pr view get expanded by the shell before the pattern matcher sees them. Try listing each command explicitly:

--allowedTools "Bash(gh pr *)" "Bash(gh issue *)" "Bash(git *)"

If you want to skip permission checks entirely in CI (where there is no interactive terminal to approve), pass --dangerously-skip-permissions. This is safe in CI because the action already runs in an isolated environment with scoped GitHub token permissions. The process hangs without it because Claude Code waits for interactive approval that never comes.

Alternatively, you can set permissions in settings.json under permissions.allow and pass the settings file via the settings input on the action. But note that --allowedTools via claude_args takes precedence over settings.json when both are present.