BYOK not working in Copilot CLI?

[bigwest60]

Describe the bug

I tried to setup copilot-cli to use my z.ai coding plan. Here is my config (in .zshrc):
export COPILOT_PROVIDER_BASE_URL=https://api.z.ai/api/coding/paas/v4
export COPILOT_PROVIDER_API_KEY=MY-Z.AI-API-KEY
export COPILOT_MODEL=GLM-5.1

and got this error:

Model "gem-5.1" is not in the built-in catalog. Using defaults for: prompt tokens (COPILOT_PROVIDER_MAX_PROMPT_TOKENS), output tokens
(COPILOT_PROVIDER_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS). Run copilot help providers for configuration details.

Then I tried local Ollama:

export COPILOT_PROVIDER_BASE_URL=http://localhost:11434
export COPILOT MODEL=gemma3:4b

and got the same message:

Model "gemma3:4b" is not in the built-in catalog. Using defaults for: prompt tokens (COPILOT_PROVIDER_MAX_PROMPT_TOKENS), output tokens
(COPILOT_PROVIDER_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS). Run copilot help providers for configuration details.

Copilot CLI does not want to run with either of these configs.

Affected version

GitHub Copilot CLI 1.0.23.

Steps to reproduce the behavior

described above.

Expected behavior

to be able to use BYOK models

Additional context

No response

[0rand]

Mate its working, read carefully. Copilot does not know token kv cache for the model you selected so it will guess. But its working. You can provide values to it.

Just type:
copilot help providers

♤♡◇♧ example ○●□■

$env:COPILOT_PROVIDER_BASE_URL = "http://localhost:11434/v1"
$env:COPILOT_PROVIDER_API_KEY = "ollama" # Local dummy
$env:COPILOT_MODEL = "qwen35_9B_65k" # Your exact tag
$env:COPILOT_PROVIDER_MAX_PROMPT_TOKENS = "65536"
$env:COPILOT_PROVIDER_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS = "32768"
copilot

[0rand]

Btw while gemma3 works with tools with ollama, gemma4 does not. Google did not bake in proper tools template into it, ollama images don't have it too. It wont work. But it works with llama_cpp. Or you can build a custom image from gguf using a minimal template from gemma3, but gemma4 still tries to run on cpu, due to bug in ollama. It runs fine in llama_cpp or lmstudio.