How to unapprove old GitHub CLI operations
17 Aug 2026
If I have to use the GitHub Copilot CLI tool, I usually end up approving each file-edit one at a time, because I don’t want to forget I blanket-approved write access, forever, for a whole folder. Turns out there’s a file I can simply backspace it out of.
- Windows:
%USERPROFILE%\.copilot\permissions-config.json - Linux:
~/.copilot/permissions-config.json
At its root, it’s an object, with a locations property, which is also an object.
Each key of that object is a directory name like "C:\\example\\some_repo", and each of those values is an object.
That object has a tool_approvals key whose value is a list of objects.
You can do surgery to take things out of the list, or you could just get rid of the whole directory-level key and start over.
When I’m all done, I like to just set it back to pretty empty, now:
{
"locations": {
}
}
