# GitHub Personal Access Tokens

These expire annually.

We use a couple for testing and automated access.

#### Creation

To create a new token, open the GitHub page.

Click on your profile in the upper right.

Scroll down and click Settings.

[![image.png](https://wiki.galaxydump.com/uploads/images/gallery/2026-04/scaled-1680-/dHlXlRhOeuaCQnMJ-image.png)](https://wiki.galaxydump.com/uploads/images/gallery/2026-04/dHlXlRhOeuaCQnMJ-image.png)

Scroll down to the bottom of the left-hand menu, and click on Developer Settings.

[![image.png](https://wiki.galaxydump.com/uploads/images/gallery/2026-04/scaled-1680-/w4HtlEPbYAcarhoX-image.png)](https://wiki.galaxydump.com/uploads/images/gallery/2026-04/w4HtlEPbYAcarhoX-image.png)

Expand the Personal Access Tokens node, and select Fine-Grained Tokens.

[![image.png](https://wiki.galaxydump.com/uploads/images/gallery/2026-04/scaled-1680-/FFq2aFNp1UTM8jri-image.png)](https://wiki.galaxydump.com/uploads/images/gallery/2026-04/FFq2aFNp1UTM8jri-image.png)

It will list any tokens you currently have and their expiry.

To make a new one, click Generate New Token.

Give it a meaningful token name.  
Ideally, this will be a multi-term token, such as:

<username>-<purpose>-<dateofissue>

For example, the user's pat may be:

LeeWhite187-UserAccess-20260426

### User Access Token Specifics

We have two active tokens.

- LeeWhite187-UserAccess-20260426
- LeeWhite187-TestAccess-20260426

#### LeeWhite187-UserAccess-20260426

This is a Fine-Grained token.

Named: LeeWhite187-UserAccess-20260426

Expiry, set to one year from creation.

Repository Access, set to All Repositories.

Here are added permissions:

- Commit Statuses - Access: Read Only
- Contents - Access: Read Only
- Environments - Access: Read Only
- Issues - Access: Read Only
- Metadata - Access: Read Only (Grayed Out)
- Commit Statuses - Access: Read Only
- Pull Requests - Access: Read Only

#### LeeWhite187-TestAccess-20260426

This is a classic Personal Access Token.

It was created to get around the access limitation of the fine-grained token.  
Specifically, the classic PAT inherently has access across all orgs.  
Whereas, the fine-grained PAT needs to be granted access to each one.  
So, we wanted the classic token, so we don't have to edit token permissions, just to make testing work.

Named: LeeWhite187-TestAccess-20260426

Expiry, set to one year from creation.

It has access for:

- Repo:status
- public\_repo
- read:org
- read:user
- read:email
- read:enterprise
- read:audit\_log