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feat: add OS keyring support for session tokens#307

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store-session-token-into-os-keyring
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feat: add OS keyring support for session tokens#307
fioan89 wants to merge 3 commits into
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store-session-token-into-os-keyring

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@fioan89 fioan89 commented May 18, 2026

Delegate session token persistence to the Coder CLI's OS keyring backend (macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager) instead of always writing them in plaintext under the plugin's data directory. This brings the Toolbox plugin in line with the VS Code extension and reduces on-disk exposure of long-lived credentials.

This change is gated on two prerequisite refactors of how we currently hand the token to the CLI, both of which land in this commit:

  1. Switch the CLI manager to provide session tokens through the CODER_SESSION_TOKEN environment variable when running coder login instead of appending --token <value> to the process arguments.

We’re making this change for security reasons. Command-line arguments are more likely to be exposed through process listings, shell history, CI/job logs, and command auditing, while environment variables have a smaller exposure surface on typical systems. This aligns the plugin with the Coder CLI guidance that prefers CODER_SESSION_TOKEN over --token.

  1. Add --use-token-as-session to the login invocation.

By default, coder login treats a supplied token as a bootstrap credential: it authenticates with it once and then mints a brand-new API key via CreateAPIKey, persisting that new key as the session. The token the user (or our OAuth2 flow) handed us is discarded. For Toolbox this is wrong: we want the CLI and the plugin to share the exact same session token so that revocation, logout, and token lifetime stay consistent across both sides.

And additional thing that we had to change was to replace zt-exec with a small internal ProcessBuilder-based runner so subprocess failures stay under our control.

We needed to remove ProcessExecutor because its exception messages include the spawned process environment. Now that CLI auth is passed through CODER_SESSION_TOKEN, failures could spill tokens into logs before our own
sanitization had a chance to run. That made reliable redaction impossible at the logging layer.

fioan89 added 3 commits May 18, 2026 22:46
Switch the CLI manager to provide session tokens through the
CODER_SESSION_TOKEN environment variable when running `coder login`
instead of appending `--token <value>` to the process arguments.

We’re making this change for security reasons. Command-line arguments are
more likely to be exposed through process listings, shell history, CI/job
logs, and command auditing, while environment variables have a smaller
exposure surface on typical systems. This aligns the plugin with the Coder
CLI guidance that prefers CODER_SESSION_TOKEN over `--token`.
Replace zt-exec with a small internal ProcessBuilder-based runner so
subprocess failures stay under our control. We needed to remove
ProcessExecutor because its exception messages include the spawned
process environment. Now that CLI auth is passed through
CODER_SESSION_TOKEN, failures could spill tokens into logs before our own
sanitization had a chance to run. That made reliable redaction impossible/ugly
at the logging layer.

The new runner uses Java 21 ProcessBuilder from Kotlin, captures stdout and
stderr, supports expected exit codes and stderr discard-on-success behavior,
and throws project-owned process exceptions with centralized secret
sanitization. This keeps process execution behavior explicit while avoiding a
dependency that could format sensitive environment values into exceptions.
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