Skip to content

Project access tokens (CORE ONLY)

Introduced in GitLab 13.0.

Project access tokens are scoped to a project and can be used to authenticate with the GitLab API.

You can also use project access tokens with Git to authenticate over HTTP or SSH.

Project access tokens expire on the date you define, at midnight UTC.

For examples of how you can use a project access token to authenticate with the API, see the following section from our API Docs.

Creating a project access token

  1. Log in to GitLab.
  2. Navigate to the project you would like to create an access token for.
  3. In the {settings} Settings menu choose Access Tokens.
  4. Choose a name and optional expiry date for the token.
  5. Choose the desired scopes.
  6. Click the Create project access token button.
  7. Save the project access token somewhere safe. Once you leave or refresh the page, you won't be able to access it again.

Project bot users

For each project access token created, a bot user will also be created and added to the project with "Maintainer" level permissions. API calls made with a project access token will be associated to the corresponding bot user.

These users will appear in {settings} Settings > Members but can not be modified. Furthermore, the bot user can not be added to any other project.

When the project access token is revoked the bot user will be deleted and all records will be moved to a system-wide user with the username "Ghost User". For more information, see Associated Records.

Revoking a project access token

At any time, you can revoke any project access token by clicking the respective Revoke button in {settings} Settings > Access Tokens.

Limiting scopes of a project access token

Project access tokens can be created with one or more scopes that allow various actions that a given token can perform. The available scopes are depicted in the following table.

Scope Description
api Grants complete read/write access to the scoped project API.
read_api Grants read access to the scoped project API.
read_registry Allows read-access (pull) to container registry images if a project is private and authorization is required.
write_registry Allows write-access (push) to container registry.
read_repository Allows read-only access (pull) to the repository.
write_repository Allows read-write access (pull, push) to the repository.