Conveniently link users to a pre-filled New GitHub Personal Access Token Page

My use case was allowing users to update a CLI tool directly from a private repo's releases that they would already have access to. The CLI tool required a valid GitHub access token with specific permissions.

To make this easy for the users, I wanted the CLI tool to open up directly into a pre-filled permissions page, instead of having to fill it in based on a README.md entry.

I dug around the page for the id of the input fields to see if I could use those to pre-fill. After trying a few variations I found it!

The base URL is

https://github.com/settings/tokens/new

Appending the following query parameters onto the URL allows us to pre-fill the form.

For Example:

https://github.com/settings/tokens/new?description=my-cli-tool&scopes=repo,read:packages,read:org

description fills the "Note" field.
scopes allows for a comma-separated list of the scopes.

Now your user only needs to press "Generate token" at the bottom of the page.

Comments

[Jérémie Astor]

Thanks!
I made a simple tool to use github discussions from the command line, which requires a PAT. This seems like something to put in its README 😄

....

Looking at the project, I have to create a README first 😕
...

[nikel]

It also supports the default_expires_at query parameter which can be 30, 90, or any other amount of days, or the special value none to make the access token never expire.