Copilot CLI Troubleshooting: Authentication, Access, Policies, and Recovery

Use this when Copilot reports missing auth information and you want to inspect your GitHub CLI auth state.

The official fix for missing or expired credentials is often to sign in again.

If nothing prints, the variable is not set in the current shell environment.

`GH_TOKEN` takes precedence over `GITHUB_TOKEN` but not over `COPILOT_GITHUB_TOKEN`.

A stale or unexpected value here can lead to wrong-account or permission confusion.

Use a supported fine-grained token rather than a classic PAT.

A mismatched version is a frequent cause of behavior not matching the docs.

This can resolve issues caused by old builds or wrapper download state.

Useful when the `gh` wrapper has cached a bad or stale binary.

The auth troubleshooting guide calls out missing keychain support as a common failure mode.

403 and policy-denied errors often come from licensing or admin settings rather than local CLI bugs.

Useful when debugging why a tool did or did not run.

A quick way to confirm environment variable names and behavior.

A good checkpoint when responses feel truncated, expensive, or oddly slow.

Long sessions can lose precision if important details are compressed or summarized.

A helpful move when the agent starts drifting or repeating itself.

A straightforward fix for wrong-account, revoked token, or cached-credential issues.