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Testing: GitHub Copilot subscription mode (headroom wrap copilot --subscription)

This is an experimental feature and we need help verifying it on Linux and Windows. It already works on macOS; the cross-platform gap is small and specific (see Status). If you have a GitHub Copilot subscription and 10 minutes, please run one of the flows below and file a report.

⚠️ This is experimental, and it reads your Copilot login token + routes your Copilot CLI traffic through a local Headroom proxy. Only run it if you're comfortable with that. The branch is open for inspection.

What it does (and what "subscription" means here)

Normally headroom wrap copilot is BYOK — you bring an Anthropic/OpenAI API key and pay that vendor. --subscription is different: it lets you use the Copilot seat you already pay GitHub for, with no separate API key, while still routing through Headroom so your context gets compressed.

Mechanically: the Copilot CLI's only interposition hook is its provider-override (the "BYOK transport"), so Headroom uses that knob but supplies your subscription token and points back at GitHub's own Copilot API. So the CLI may print "BYOK" and require an explicit --model, but you are not paying a third party — it's your subscription, just compressed. (Proof it's working: the proxy forwards to GitHub's Copilot API — https://api.githubcopilot.com by default — with your token.)

API host & Enterprise / data-residency

Headroom routes wrapped Copilot traffic to GitHub's generic public host, https://api.githubcopilot.com, for both --subscription and the implicit OAuth path. That host serves the full model set (including newer models on the responses API) and matches the routing that worked before 0.23.

Headroom deliberately does not auto-select a per-account host from /copilot_internal/user. That endpoint advertises a segmented host (e.g. api.individual.githubcopilot.com) that does not serve newer models on the responses API and is not the host the official Copilot client routes with — using it regressed headroom wrap copilot after 0.22.4 (#610).

Enterprise / data-residency: if your organization is provisioned on a dedicated Copilot API host (GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency, or an egress proxy), pin it explicitly — the override flows through both --subscription and OAuth, and onward through the proxy to the upstream request:

export GITHUB_COPILOT_API_URL=https://api.<your-host>.githubcopilot.com
headroom wrap copilot --subscription -- --model gpt-5.4

If you operate such an environment and would like Headroom to auto-detect the correct host instead of pinning it, please open an issue — the intended path is to resolve it from GitHub's token-exchange endpoint (the source the official Copilot client uses), and we'd want to validate it against a real enterprise tenant.

Status

Platform Mechanism (compress + forward) Token auto-discovery from the OS secret store
macOS (Keychain) ✅ verified ✅ verified (copilot-cli)
Linux (secret-tool/libsecret) ✅ expected ❓ needs testing
Windows (Credential Manager) ✅ expected ❓ needs testing
Any OS via GITHUB_COPILOT_TOKEN env var ✅ verified by tests n/a (bypasses discovery)

The two things we want to learn:

  1. Does it work end to end on your OS?
  2. Does it find your Copilot token automatically, or do you have to set GITHUB_COPILOT_TOKEN? If it can't find it, we need the storage schema (see each flow) so we can fix auto-discovery.

Prerequisites (all platforms)

  1. A GitHub Copilot subscription.
  2. The GitHub Copilot CLI: npm install -g @github/copilot
  3. Log in once: run copilot, complete the device-code login in your browser, then type /exit.

Linux — the flow we most need (tests auto-discovery)

Auto-discovery only works with a host-native install (a container can't read your host secret store). Linux has prebuilt wheels, so:

pipx install --pip-args='--pre' headroom-ai     # or: pip install --pre headroom-ai
# (no separate API key needed — that's the point)
headroom wrap copilot --subscription -- --model gpt-4o -p "Reply with exactly: HEADROOM_OK"
  • If it prints HEADROOM_OK → auto-discovery works on your Linux. 🎉 Report success.
  • If it errors with "no reusable bearer token" → discovery missed your token. Please grab the schema so we can fix it (redact the secret), then confirm the mechanism works via the env var: 
    secret-tool search --all 2>/dev/null | sed -E 's/^secret = .*/secret = <redacted>/'
# then retry, supplying the token explicitly:
GITHUB_COPILOT_TOKEN='<your-token>' headroom wrap copilot --subscription -- --model gpt-4o -p "Reply with: HEADROOM_OK"
    Report the attribute.* lines from secret-tool and whether the env-var retry worked.

Windows

There is no native Windows wheel yet, so pick one:

A. Mechanism test (easiest — Docker Desktop or WSL2):

$env:HEADROOM_DOCKER_IMAGE = "ghcr.io/chopratejas/headroom:<branch-tag>"   # ask the maintainer for the tag
# run the Docker-native installer (scripts/install.ps1), then:
$env:GITHUB_COPILOT_TOKEN = "<your-token>"
headroom wrap copilot --subscription -- --model gpt-4o -p "Reply with: HEADROOM_OK"

Report whether it prints HEADROOM_OK.

B. Native auto-discovery schema (even without a working install): after copilot login, tell us where Windows stored the token:

cmd /c "cmdkey /list"

Report the Target: line that looks Copilot-related (it shows the target name, not the secret). That single fact lets us make native Windows discovery work.

Native Windows auto-discovery becomes fully testable once we add a Windows wheel to the build matrix — tracked separately.

macOS (already proven — a second data point still helps)

pipx install --pip-args='--pre' headroom-ai
headroom wrap copilot --subscription -- --model gpt-4o -p "Reply with exactly: HEADROOM_OK"

Schema, for reference: Keychain generic password, service copilot-cli (security find-generic-password -s copilot-cli -w).

What to report

Please open a Copilot subscription test report with:

  • OS + version and how you installed (pipx/pip wheel, Docker, source).
  • Was plain copilot logged in?
  • Did wrap copilot --subscription print HEADROOM_OK? Paste any error.
  • Did it work without setting GITHUB_COPILOT_TOKEN (auto-discovery), or only with it?
  • The storage schema if discovery failed (secret-tool search --all / cmdkey /list), with the secret redacted.