Enable Signing in with ChatGPT account for browserless machines

Works on WSL, first set WSL to use your windows browser e.g.

export BROWSER="/mnt/c/Program Files/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe"

Then proceed as normal.

Yes, it works comically badly compared to claude code, but my tip is to authenticate on your laptop/desktop and then to copy over the auth.json file to the remote server

Yes I have found a workaround but would be great to have a proper solution like cloud code

Yes, it works comically badly compared to claude code, but my tip is to authenticate on your laptop/desktop and then to copy over the auth.json file to the remote server

How do you do this (auth and get an auth.json, and where do you put it?). I've been tearing my hair out today trying to get this going. I've got ssh tunnels going, all kinds of stuff. Nothing has worked.

Also qwen code has a much better solution Via qr code

When attempting to log in to a remote server via SSH using my personal ChatGPT Plus account, the authentication process fails.

The error occurs after pasting the provided URL into my local browser.

<img width="887" height="375" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/8d9fe4ca-6b4c-4f4c-bd6c-ff5f1dd50b7a" />

https://auth0.com/docs/get-started/authentication-and-authorization-flow/device-authorization-flow

Device auth flow would be great!

I also hit this issue. Here is a workaround.

First: Set Up an SSH Tunnel from Your Local Machine

Run the following command from your local machine's terminal. This creates a tunnel that forwards port 1455 on your local machine to port 1455 on the remote (headless) machine:

ssh -N -f -L 1455:127.0.0.1:1455 <user>@<remote-host>

Then: Complete Authentication Through Your Browser

• Start Codex on your remote (headless) machine. It will provide a URL for authentication.
• Copy this URL and open it in your local browser (e.g., Chrome or Firefox).
• Proceed through the authentication steps.

The authentication requests will now be forwarded securely through the SSH tunnel back to your remote VM, completing the sign-in.

EDIT:
Just found the answer in the docs https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/docs/authentication.md#connecting-on-a-headless-machine

@fgn Yes there are many workarpounds, also copying the configuration json. This issue is though for "asking" a proper solution

@fgn Yes there are many workarpounds, also copying the configuration json. This issue is though for "asking" a proper solution

Yes indeed, a proper fix is exactly what we want. A search engine led me here instead of the documentation, and the auth.json solution didn't work in my case. Until this is resolved properly, I wanted to help others landing here with the same issue.

+1

Telling users to manually copy around a very sensitive auth file seems worse than the phishing risk of an OOB token like Claude supports. The "correct" way to support this is the Device Code Flow as mentioned above, but the user experience of OOB is better. Without this functionality, usage of Codex in CodeSpaces or fully isolated VM's is brutal 😭

We're using this issue to track this request, so I'm going to close this issue. Please refer to the other issue for updates.