Getting CLI authentication right: the complete guide to all 5 methods

This article is created by Logto, an open-source solution that helps developers implement secure auth in minutes instead of months. Every developer CLI ships with login as its first command. And every one of them solves auth differently. GitHub shows you a code and opens your browser to verify it. AWS opens a browser for PKCE-based SSO. Stripe has you confirm a pairing code in the dashboard. The newer AI tools (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex CLI, Cursor) each picked their own approach too. If you're building a CLI, auth is one of the first things you need to figure out. Pick the wrong method and you'll hear about it: frustrated users, security audits, or both. And with the recent wave of AI coding agents that call CLI tools programmatically, the stakes are higher: you're not just authenticating a human anymore. You might be handing credentials to an autonomous process. Here are the five auth methods that matter, how the biggest tools implement them, and the mistakes you'll want to avoid. Th