Workflow Token Authentication Clarified | Generated by AI

Home 2026.06

All good now. The ww action just ran successfully and triggered the workflow.

The error was NOT caused by your SSH→HTTPS switch. Here’s what happened:

  1. ww action uses gh workflow run (the gh CLI), which uses its OWN OAuth token stored in macOS Keychain — completely separate from SSH keys or GITHUB_PAT_TOKEN

  2. When --ref is omitted, gh calls GitHub’s GraphQL API to determine the repo’s default branch. That call returned 401 Bad credentials — a transient auth issue (possibly token refresh race, GitHub API hiccup, or proxy glitch through mihomo)

  3. Your gh auth status was fine then and is fine now. The command works now without any changes.

To avoid this in the future, you can pin the ref so gh doesn’t need to query the default branch:

ww action gh-pages.yml --ref main

Also note: GITHUB_PAT_TOKEN (used by ww github commands for GraphQL) works for REST but fails for GraphQL. That’s a separate issue — your PAT likely lacks the right scopes for GraphQL. The gh CLI token works for both. If you want ww github commands to work too, you’d need to regenerate the PAT with proper scopes or switch github_mgmt.py to fall back to gh auth token.

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