Copilot Coding Agent session overwrites custom actions/checkout options silently

[darcien]

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Problems

I have a custom .github/workflows/copilot-setup-steps.yml with actions/checkout@v4 step.
From my understanding, the steps in the copilot-setup-steps should have no restriction.

But from my observation, when Copilot Coding Agent starts a new session, actions/checkout@v4 custom options are being overwritten.

I'll give an example

# .github/workflows/copilot-setup-steps.yml
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          # Note how I have custom options here
          fetch-depth: 0
          persist-credentials: true

These options are respected just fine if the workflow runs are triggered not via agent session, e.g. via PR push. Even if the one pushing the PR is the coding agent. I've tested it because I'm making these changes using agent.

This is the log after agent pushed the updates:

After custom workflow has been merged, I created a new issue and assigned copilot to it.

Note how the options for actions/checkout are overwritten in the agent session:

Questions

• Is this an expected behavior?
• If this is expected, shouldn't this be documented? And what about other actions?

Expectations

• Either this should be clearly documented,
• or copilot should yell at me if it's going be to overwritten,
• or this is a bug and should not happen in the first place.

Use case

Specific to my use case, I need other branches to be available locally in the agent session.
The common solution here is use the persisted git credentials from actions/checkout in next step to manually call git fetch. These credentials will be cleaned up in the post job step automatically anyway.

Workaround?

As temporary workaround, I'm using the built in GH token from the action env to authenticate with GH and do fetch.

      - name: Fetch main branch
        run: |
          git remote set-url origin https://x-access-token:${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}@github.com/${{ github.repository }}.git
          git fetch origin main:main

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