Wrapper script workaround for GitHub Copilot to persist tool approvals

Update

GitHub Copilot does now have global config for allowable tools. Original post follows.

Original Post

It would seem GitHub Copilot does not have a global configuration option to persist allowed tools. I often want to run something like kubectl or jq with Copilot and having to specify it on the command-line each time is tedious. Note, if you are reading this a while after I wrote this post then it may well support this properly. What I did was create a wrapper script, say ~/bin/copilot and put that ahead of the NVM path in my shell config.

The script looks like:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Note: This script assumes you already have Nodejs installed via NVM.
#       Easy enough to adjust if this is not the case for you.

if [[ -z $NVM_DIR ]]; then
  NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
fi

node_version=$(node --version)
binary="$NVM_DIR/versions/node/$node_version/bin/copilot"
if [[ ! -f "$binary" ]]; then
  source "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"
  npm install -g @github/copilot
fi

# Add any other tools you may need
"$binary" --allow-tool 'shell(git)' \
  --allow-tool 'write' \
  --allow-tool 'shell(kubectl)' \
  --allow-tool 'shell(jq)' \
  --deny-tool 'shell(git push)' \
  "$@"

Which seems to work for me as a low-tech way to customise this.