New PAT rotation policies preview and optional expiration for fine-grained PATs

Enterprise and organization administrators can now set limits on token lifetimes for the personal access tokens (PATs) used against their resources. These policies mandate token rotation on a regular basis and reduce how long a compromised token is good for, while also providing a lever to reduce the use of less-secure PATs in your company. This public preview is available for all enterprises and organizations, and will be included in GHES 3.16.

Administrators can choose a maximum lifetime between 1 and 366 days for fine-grained PATs and PATs (Classic).
The policies for each token type are distinct, so you can promote the use of fine-grained tokens with a longer lifetime while driving down PAT (Classic) usage with a very short lifetime requirement.

The policies apply when tokens are created, regenerated, or used.

If you want to create a PAT for a specific organization, but that organization or enterprise has a lifetime policy, your lifetime options will be restricted. Additionally, if you try to use an already-created PAT in an organization or enterprise with a policy, the call will fail if the token has too long a lifetime.

If your enterprise has audit log streaming enabled, you’ll be able to track when this policy has blocked a PAT from being used.

Allowing infinite-lifetime fine-grained PATs

With this change, developers can now create fine-grained tokens with no expiration for personal projects, an option that developer feedback said was needed to migrate from PATs (Classic) to more secure fine-grained PATs.

Enterprises and organizations have a 366 day expiration policy for fine-grained tokens by default, so developers still can’t create infinite lifetime fine-grained PATs for use against an organization they’re a member of, unless the administrator relaxes the policy.

For more information, see our documentation on Enterprise and Organization PAT policies.

Join the discussion within GitHub Community for feedback and questions.