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Sessions & API Tokens

Users can generate tokens to make API requests on behalf of themselves.

Short-Lived Tokens (Sessions)

The Coder CLI and Backstage Plugin use short-lived token to authenticate. To generate a short-lived session token on behalf of your account, visit the following URL: https://coder.example.com/cli-auth

Session Durations

By default, sessions last 24 hours and are automatically refreshed. You can configure CODER_SESSION_DURATION to change the duration and CODER_DISABLE_SESSION_EXPIRY_REFRESH to configure this behavior.

Long-Lived Tokens (API Tokens)

Users can create long lived tokens. We refer to these as "API tokens" in the product.

Generate a long-lived API token on behalf of yourself

Visit your account settings in the top right of the dashboard or by navigating to https://coder.example.com/settings/account

Navigate to the tokens page in the sidebar and create a new token:

Generate a long-lived API token on behalf of another user

You must have the Owner role to generate a token for another user.

As of Coder v2.17+, you can use the CLI or API to create long-lived tokens on behalf of other users. Use the API for earlier versions of Coder.

coder tokens create --name my-token --user <username>

See the full CLI reference for coder tokens create

Set max token length

You can use the CODER_MAX_TOKEN_LIFETIME server flag to set the maximum duration for long-lived tokens in your deployment.

API Key Scopes

API key scopes allow you to limit the permissions of a token to specific operations. By default, tokens are created with the all scope, granting full access to all actions the user can perform. For improved security, you can create tokens with limited scopes that restrict access to only the operations needed.

Scopes follow the format resource:action, where resource is the type of object (like workspace, template, or user) and action is the operation (like read, create, update, or delete). You can also use wildcards like workspace:* to grant all permissions for a specific resource type.

Creating tokens with scopes

You can specify scopes when creating a token using the --scope flag:

# Create a token that can only read workspaces
coder tokens create --name "readonly-token" --scope "workspace:read"

# Create a token with multiple scopes
coder tokens create --name "limited-token" --scope "workspace:read" --scope "template:read"

Common scope examples include:

workspace:read - View workspace information
workspace:* - Full workspace access (create, read, update, delete)
template:read - View template information
api_key:read - View API keys (useful for automation)
application_connect - Connect to workspace applications

For a complete list of available scopes, see the API reference documentation.

Allow lists (advanced)

For additional security, you can combine scopes with allow lists to restrict tokens to specific resources. Allow lists let you limit a token to only interact with particular workspaces, templates, or other resources by their UUID:

# Create a token limited to a specific workspace
coder tokens create --name "workspace-token" \
  --scope "workspace:read" \
  --allow "workspace:a1b2c3d4-5678-90ab-cdef-1234567890ab"

Important: Allow lists are exclusive - the token can only perform actions on resources explicitly listed. In the example above, the token can only read the specified workspace and cannot access any other resources (templates, organizations, other workspaces, etc.). To maintain access to other resources, you must explicitly add them to the allow list:

# Token that can read one workspace AND access templates and user info
coder tokens create --name "limited-token" \
  --scope "workspace:read" --scope "template:*" --scope "user:read" \
  --allow "workspace:a1b2c3d4-5678-90ab-cdef-1234567890ab" \
  --allow "template:*" \
  --allow "user:*" \
  ... etc

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