Does GitKraken support GitHub fine‑grained personal access tokens?

Answer: Yes, but with limitations

GitKraken can authenticate to GitHub using a fine‑grained personal access token (PAT) for standard Git operations (clone, fetch, pull, push) when the token is supplied via the credential manager or embedded in the HTTPS remote URL. It does not have a dedicated UI for fine‑grained PATs and does not validate or request additional scopes; it simply passes the token to the underlying Git binary.

Confirmed facts

• GitKraken’s primary GitHub integration uses OAuth, which manages permissions via broad scopes.
• When a fine‑grained PAT is used, GitKraken treats it like any other PAT: the token is handed to Git, and the result of the Git command is shown.
• If the token lacks the required scope (e.g., missing write:repository for a push), Git returns a 403 Forbidden error, which GitKraken surfaces as a generic authentication/permission failure.
• GitKraken does not log scope‑specific validation messages; the console shows only the raw stderr from Git.

Steps to test a fine‑grained PAT with read‑only scope

1. Create a fine‑grained PAT on GitHub with Repository access → Read‑only for a specific repository (no write permissions).
2. In GitKraken, add the repository using the HTTPS URL (e.g., https://github.com/owner/repo.git).
3. When prompted for credentials, enter your GitHub username and the fine‑grained PAT as the password, or configure a credential manager to supply the token.
4. Attempt a read operation (e.g., git pull) – it should succeed.
5. Attempt a write operation (e.g., git push or creating a branch) – GitKraken will show a permission‑denied error, indicating the token’s missing scope.

No additional diagnostic detail is needed for this recommendation; the behavior described holds across recent GitKraken versions that rely on the underlying Git binary for PAT handling.