Codex CLI frozen immediately upon install when attempting sign-in

Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Dec 12, 2025 by NeonWizard Closed Mar 29, 2026

💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What version of Codex is running?

codex-cli 0.71.0

What subscription do you have?

ChatGPT Plus

Which model were you using?

N/A

What platform is your computer?

Windows 10 (x64) - WSL2 Ubuntu

What issue are you seeing?

With a fresh install, upon opening with codex and selecting "Sign in with ChatGPT", the entire terminal freezes. I'm unable to exit with SIGINT.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

With a fresh install, upon opening with codex and selecting "Sign in with ChatGPT", the entire terminal freezes. I'm unable to exit with SIGINT.

What is the expected behavior?

With a fresh install, upon opening with codex and selecting "Sign in with ChatGPT", I'm able to sign in with ChatGPT.

Additional information

_No response_

View original on GitHub ↗

3 Comments

etraut-openai contributor · 8 months ago

I assume you mean codex rather than claude.

This is the first report we've heard of a freeze like this, so it must be something that's relatively specific to your system.

When you choose Sign in with ChatGPT, that should open a browser for logging in using an OAuth flow.

Does the problem occur when you run codex natively, outside of WSL? I'm guessing that the problem is specific to your WSL environment.

As a workaround, you could use our new device code authentication flow.

NeonWizard · 8 months ago

I assume you mean codex rather than claude. This is the first report we've heard of a freeze like this, so it must be something that's relatively specific to your system. When you choose Sign in with ChatGPT, that should open a browser for logging in using an OAuth flow. Does the problem occur when you run codex natively, outside of WSL? I'm guessing that the problem is specific to your WSL environment. As a workaround, you could use our new device code authentication flow.

Sorry, fixed the typo. Very used to claude and this was my attempt at giving codex a try. I haven't tried codex natively but I did try with a variety of terminals on WSL, with the same issue. I actually can't even run codex login, it just hangs indefinitely.

I ended up doing the remote authentication flow described in the docs on one of my Ubuntu hosts and that unblocked me locally after copying the auth over.

etraut-openai contributor · 5 months ago

This bug report hasn't received any upvotes or additional posts in four months. Closing.