How do you authenticate GitHub Copilot CLI and what token types are supported?

Copilot CLI supports two authentication methods: an interactive browser-based flow (default) and a token-based flow for headless/automated environments.

# Method 1: Interactive browser flow (first time use)
copilot
# → prompted to /login if not authenticated
# Follow on-screen browser authentication

# Method 2: Fine-grained PAT in environment variable
export COPILOT_GITHUB_TOKEN=github_pat_xxx
copilot -p "List my open issues"

# Method 3: Use GH_TOKEN or GITHUB_TOKEN (checked in order)
export GH_TOKEN=your_token_here
copilot -p "Explain this code"

Token type precedence (checked in order): COPILOT_GITHUB_TOKEN → GH_TOKEN → GITHUB_TOKEN.

Supported token types:

• Fine-grained personal access tokens (v2 PATs) with the Copilot Requests permission
• OAuth tokens from the Copilot CLI app
• OAuth tokens from the GitHub CLI (gh) app
• Classic personal access tokens (ghp_) are NOT supported

When no credential store is found, the token is saved as plain text in ~/.copilot/ (or the path set by COPILOT_HOME).

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