Switch between Codex (ChatGPT) accounts

The short answer

yoink add
yoink save codex-work --tool codex
yoink use codex-work
yoink use codex-work --force
yoink current --tool codex

yoink add opens a menu where ChatGPT (Codex) sits next to Claude accounts and providers. yoink save snapshots whichever ChatGPT login Codex holds right now. yoink use switches, and --force skips the running-process check described below. yoink current --tool codex prints only the active Codex profile.

A switch prints the profile name with the account email and ChatGPT plan, then a reminder to restart:

✔ Switched to codex-work (work@example.com · team)
Restart Codex to pick up the new login.

Where Codex keeps its login

Codex has one login home: $CODEX_HOME when that variable is set, otherwise ~/.codex. yoink follows the same rule, so a shell that exports CODEX_HOME switches the login in that directory. Inside it, the login lives in one of two places, decided by cli_auth_credentials_store in config.toml:

Any other value stops yoink with a message naming the file, rather than guessing. On macOS, the Keychain entry's account name is derived from the real path of your Codex home (cli| plus the first 16 hex characters of its SHA-256), so two Codex homes keep two separate entries and a switch in one never touches the other.

yoink reads the account from the ID token in that login: the email, and the ChatGPT plan from the https://api.openai.com/auth claim. That decoding happens locally. A Codex home signed in with an API key instead of ChatGPT can be saved too; it is labeled OpenAI API key and matched by a short hash of the key, so the key itself never appears in yoink list.

Add a second ChatGPT login

Run yoink add in a terminal and choose ChatGPT (Codex). Before anything else, yoink saves the login that is live now as its own profile (if no profile holds it yet) and tells you the name it used. Then it runs codex login, which opens a browser for you to sign in to the other ChatGPT account. When you return, yoink captures the new login, suggests a name built from the email (an address starting with work@ becomes codex-work), and asks whether to add another.

If the sign-in fails, or the login is unchanged afterward, yoink saves nothing and puts the previous login back. yoink add needs an interactive terminal; in a script, sign in with codex login yourself and run yoink save <name> --tool codex.

Switch, and the running-process guard

A running Codex can write its old token back on its next refresh, which would undo the switch. yoink looks for a process named codex, or a Node process running the @openai/codex package. When it finds one:

• In a terminal, it asks "ChatGPT (Codex) is running. It may overwrite the login on its next refresh. Switch anyway?" with No as the default.
• From a script, it refuses with "ChatGPT (Codex) is running, so the switch was skipped. Close it first, or pass --force." and exits with status 1.

The rest of the switch (re-saving the live login only when its identity matches, the atomic write, and the rollback on failure) is the same for every subscription tool and is described in What a switch does. Only Codex changes; Claude Code and the other tools keep their logins. Codex switching is CLI only: the Mac menu bar app switches Claude Code accounts and manages providers, but not ChatGPT logins (see Desktop app).

Linux keyring limitation

yoink can only read and write a keyring-stored Codex login on macOS. On Linux and Windows it refuses as soon as config.toml says "keyring" or "auto", even when an auth.json happens to exist, because with "auto" Codex may still move the login into the keyring. The error names the exact file to edit:

cli_auth_credentials_store = "file"

Add that line to config.toml in your Codex home, run codex login once more so Codex writes auth.json, then save and switch as usual.

When a provider overrides the ChatGPT login

If you also use yoink to connect an API-key provider to Codex with a default model, yoink writes model_provider = "<provider>" into the same config.toml. Codex then talks to that provider, and the ChatGPT login you switched to is not used. yoink checks for this after every Codex switch and prints a warning with the full path to the file:

! Codex is set to model_provider = "openrouter" in ~/.codex/config.toml, which overrides the ChatGPT login. Run `yoink disconnect openrouter --from codex` or remove model_provider from that file to use ChatGPT.

The value openai (Codex's built-in provider) does not trigger the warning. To run Codex on an API key instead of a subscription, see the Codex harness page for what yoink writes into config.toml, and codex is responses-only for why the openai preset is the one preset Codex accepts.

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