Use an Existing Access Token

When you authorize an org using the org login commands, Salesforce CLI takes care of generating and refreshing all tokens, such as the access token. But sometimes you want to run a few CLI commands against an existing org without going through the entire authorization process. In this case, you provide the access token and URL of the Salesforce instance that hosts the org to which you want to connect.
Almost all CLI commands that have the --target-org | -o flag accept an access token. The only exception is org display user.
  1. Open a terminal (macOS and Linux) or command prompt (Windows).
  2. To get the instance URL and access token for the org to connect to, run the org display command. See the values for the Access Token and Instance Url keys.
    sf org display --target-org myorg
    === Org Description
    
     KEY             VALUE                                           
     ─────────────── ───────────────────────────────────────────────
     Access Token    00D8H0000007wprAQkAQAlOT5H (truncated for security) 
    ...
     Instance Url    https://creative-impala-20hx3-dev-ed.my.salesforce.com  
    ...
  3. Use config set to set the org-instance-url configuration variable. To set it locally, run the command from a Salesforce DX project; to set it globally, use the --global flag.
    sf config set org-instance-url=https://creative-impala-20hx3-dev-ed.my.salesforce.com --global
  4. When you run the CLI command, use the org’s access token as the value for the --target-org flag rather than the org’s username. For example:
    sf project deploy start --source-dir <source-dir> --target-org 00D8H0000007wprAQkAQAlOT5H

    If your access token contains a ! character, you must sometimes escape it with a backslash (\). For example, if your access token is 00007wpr!AQkAQA, specify it this way: --target-org 00007wpr\!AQkAQA

    Tip

Salesforce CLI doesn’t store the access token in its internal files. It uses it only for this CLI command run.