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

dakdevs

Dak Washbrook

Posted on November 15, 2020

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
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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
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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.

💖 💪 🙅 🚩
dakdevs
Dak Washbrook

Posted on November 15, 2020

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