Support refresh tokens for Claude Max subscribers in GitHub Actions

[eversluis]

Problem

Claude Max subscribers cannot reliably use the GitHub Action with their subscription. The current OAuth flow produces tokens that expire in approximately 1 day, making it impractical for CI/CD use.

Current Situation

1. The action supports claude_code_oauth_token as an alternative to anthropic_api_key
2. Subscribers can extract OAuth tokens from ~/.claude/ after running /login
3. These tokens expire quickly (~1 day)
4. There is no claude_code_refresh_token input to automatically refresh expired tokens
5. The /install-github-app command sets up tokens but they also expire quickly

Expected Behavior

Max subscribers should be able to use their subscription with GitHub Actions without:

• Paying additional API costs
• Manually refreshing tokens daily
• Building custom refresh automation

Proposed Solutions

1. Add refresh token support: Accept a claude_code_refresh_token input and automatically refresh the access token when expired
2. Longer-lived tokens: Issue longer-lived OAuth tokens for CI/CD use cases
3. GitHub App OAuth: The Claude GitHub App should handle authentication automatically for subscribers who have installed it and linked their account

Workaround

Currently the only reliable option is to use anthropic_api_key, which incurs additional costs beyond the Max subscription.

Environment

• Claude Code version: 2.0.56
• Using: Claude Max subscription
• Action: anthropics/claude-code-action

[commander]

For me the CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN itself is not working. I just configured the github action using /install-github-action and so far claude has not successfully run a single time. response from claude always contains this:

{
"type": "result",
"subtype": "success",
"is_error": false,
"duration_ms": 122,
"num_turns": 0,
"total_cost_usd": 0,
"permission_denials": []
}

if you see num_turns: 0, basically it does nothing.

[andrewrimmer]

Oof, I was not expecting this limitation.

[jacob-ablowitz]

did you all not try claude setup-token ? Claude itself found that for me when I was trying to remember how I set up a token for one of my repos like four months ago, and claude code informed me just now when I ran it that the token validity is good for one year...

(Max 5x subscriber, but this worked when I had Pro too)