Recently I have been working on Sitecore Upgrade from 10.3 to 10.4.1 and as part of the process I installed a fresh instance of Sitecore 10.4.1 and started apply my solution changes one by one. When it can to running the serialization push command to push all my serialized content to Sitecore, I faced this issue which took me a few hours to figure out as I kept thinking its an identity server issue.

Problem

After a fresh 10.4.1 installation, trying to log in via the CLI from a solution that was previously used for 10.3.1 gave the following error

dotnet sitecore login --authority https://sc1041identityserver.dev.local --cm https://sc1041cm.dev.local --allow-write true

Error while getting client credentials token: invalid_client

Output:

Error while getting client credentials token: invalid_client

Checking the Identity Server logs, I noticed something curious:

No client with id 'SitecoreCLIServer' found

At first, this was confusing 10.4.1 ships with a fresh Identity Server configuration, so why was it expecting a client called SitecoreCLIServer?

Findings

Here’s what I realized:

1. Legacy CLI Client
   • In Sitecore 10.3 and earlier, the DevEx CLI sometimes used SitecoreCLIServer as the default client for automation.
2. 10.4 CLI Uses sitecore.cli
   • The new CLI expects the client ID sitecore.cli.
3. Project-Level Overrides
   • Even though I had a fresh install, my upgrade project folder still contained a hidden .sitecore directory with sitecore.json or user.json.
   • These files contained "clientId": "SitecoreCLIServer", forcing the CLI to send the old client ID.

Solution

The solution was to simply delete the .sitecore folder at your project root and then run the login command again which will create the new files needed by Sitecore CLI