Vercel is requiring that I give access to an unknown Github user to create deployments

A few months ago I deployed a project to Vercel and every time I pushed to my repo it successfully triggered a deploy.

The only weird thing was that the deployments would consistently show the github user as the author, instead of my own. I have no idea who this user is, and I have never authorized their access to my repo, but I presumed this was an account used behind the scenes by Vercel.

Pushing to the repo now does nothing and instead on Github I can see the following error: Git author scsmncao must have access to the project on Vercel to create deployments

Clicking through to details, I'm asked to: Please connect [my user] on Vercel to the GitHub account to request access and join the Team.

With some hesitation I tried to authorize this user but got this error: Please use the GitHub account to request access to the Team

I don't understand what on earth is going on here. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting the repo without any issues, but the problem persists. I am able to select "redeploy" for a previous deployment. I was hoping this would be a temporary fix but it seems to redeploy the same commit as in the previous deployment, not the most recent.

I've looked at similar discussions elsewhere but they all seem to differ in slight ways. Why does Vercel insist on wanting access for this mystery user to my repo?

It seems like the problem was I had not actively set my username and email address in my local git config.

This seems like a pretty insane glitch if I'm understanding this correctly. Vercel it seems was looking at my commits and could not tell who made them, so they just assigned some random GitHub account as the author. And then it was telling me to give access to this account to my private repo. It's lucky that it turns out I wasn't able to do what they asked me to, since that user would have needed to first request access. Otherwise, would this not be a pretty serious security issue?

Would love an answer from the Vercel team.

how to set username and email in local git config? please help . unable to deploy since morniing

This worked for me

git config --global user.name "[your github account name]" git config --global user.email "[email associated with your github account]"

Hey . I'm glad you found the solution!

Git metadata is used to determine who made the commit and whether they are allowed to deploy your Vercel project. If the git config had the wrong email, then it would make the system think someone other than yourself was trying to create a new deployment. That's why you got a notification about that other GitHub account needing to be authorized.

If you want to know more about automatic Git deployments with Vercel, this page has additional info:

https://vercel.com/docs/deployments/git