Today, customers using GitHub PATs can easily reference their credential within pipeline scripts using:

<+secrets.getValue("GITHUB_PAT_ID")>

When migrating to GitHub Apps, the recommended approach is to use the drone-github-app-token plugin to generate a short-lived installation token at runtime. While this works, it requires additional pipeline logic and forces customers to explicitly generate and manage tokens.

It would be beneficial if the GitHub connector exposed a native runtime expression that returned the appropriate authentication token, regardless of whether the connector was configured with a PAT or a GitHub App. For example:

<+connectors.getToken("GITHUB_CONNECTOR")

This would abstract the underlying authentication mechanism, simplify migrations from PATs to GitHub Apps, reduce pipeline complexity, and allow customers to write connector-agnostic pipeline code without caring how the connector authenticates.

For example, some customer have to perform git push operations from within their pipelines. They'd like to leverage the connector's authentication directly instead of having to generate a new GitHub App installation token within each pipeline.