Switch between GitHub Copilot CLI accounts

The short answer

yoink add
yoink save gh-work --tool copilot
yoink save gh-personal --tool copilot
yoink use gh-work
yoink current --tool copilot

Run yoink save once while each account is the active one, or let yoink add (pick GitHub Copilot) run the sign-in for you. After that, yoink use <name> moves Copilot to that account:

✔ Switched to gh-work (octo-work)
Restart the Copilot CLI to pick up the new login.

How Copilot stores several users

Copilot CLI's login home is $COPILOT_HOME when that variable is set, otherwise ~/.copilot. Its config.json already knows about more than one GitHub account. yoink reads two keys from it:

Because Copilot keeps the tokens for each signed-in user itself, a yoink Copilot profile is unusually small: it stores the host and login of one account and nothing else. There is no Copilot token in ~/.config/yoink/subscriptions.json. The name shown is the GitHub login, and for a host other than https://github.com, such as a GitHub Enterprise server, it becomes login@host (for example octo@ghe.example.com).

Add another GitHub login

copilot login adds an account without signing the others out, so adding one is straightforward. Through yoink, run yoink add and choose GitHub Copilot. yoink saves the account that is active now as a profile (if none holds it yet), then runs copilot login. Finish the GitHub device login in your browser, come back to the terminal, and yoink captures the new account and asks for a profile name.

Prefer to do it yourself? Save the current account first with yoink save gh-work --tool copilot, run copilot login as the second user, then yoink save gh-personal --tool copilot. Both accounts stay in logged_in_users, so neither sign-in is lost.

What a switch changes (one key)

yoink use gh-personal reads config.json, finds the matching entry in logged_in_users, and writes it into last_logged_in_user. Every other key in the file is kept as it was. The file is written atomically with owner-only permissions, as formatted JSON.

Hosts are compared without case or a trailing slash, and logins without case, so https://GitHub.com/ and https://github.com count as the same server. If the account in the profile is not in logged_in_users any more, yoink refuses with a message such as:

✖ octo@ghe.example.com is not logged in to GitHub Copilot on this machine. Run `copilot login` as that user first.

yoink also refuses, with a hint to run copilot login, when config.json is missing. If Copilot is running (a process named copilot), yoink asks before switching, and a script must pass --force. The full sequence is in What a switch does.

Environment variables that override the login

Copilot prefers a token from the environment over the stored login. After every switch, yoink checks three variables, COPILOT_GITHUB_TOKEN, GH_TOKEN and GITHUB_TOKEN, and prints one warning naming every one of them that is set and non-empty:

! GH_TOKEN is set and overrides the stored GitHub Copilot login. Unset it for the switch to take effect.

The switch itself still happens. Unset the named variables in the shell where you start Copilot, or the account in last_logged_in_user will not be the one in use.

FAQ