Taking a Look at the GitHub CLI Tool

The GitHub CLI is a new tool released by GitHub that brings issue/PR management tasks to the terminal. This will be an important tool that brings more of our software development workflow into the textual realm instead of the visual realm (the browser). It’s called gh!

What Does it Do?

The GitHub CLI allows you to manage issues/PRs/repos from within your terminal. To give you an idea, here’s a broad overview of the API:

$ gh issue [status, list, view, create]
$ gh pr [status, list, view, checkout, create]
$ gh repo [view, create, clone, fork]
$ gh help

You can also append --help flags to get documentation about specific commands. Like this:

$ gh repo fork --help

It should be mentioned that gh isn’t the same as git. This is because gh only brings GitHub features to the terminal. Version control still needs to be handled with git. 💻

Installing GitHub CLI

GitHub CLI has releases for major operating systems. For example, if you’re using a Mac you can install via Homebrew:

$ brew install github/gh/gh

Voilá! The gh command should be available in your terminal. When you first run gh you will need to authorize GitHub CLI (via OAuth) in your browser.

Ok, you’re ready to rock! 🤘😤

Issues and gh

We’ll cover a few interesting commands just to whet our appetites. Let’s use the official React.js repo as a guinea pig to execute gh commands.

Let’s clone, and navigate to the react repo:

$ git clone git@github.com:facebook/react.git
$ cd react

Let’s run $ gh issue --help to see what commands are available:

# Usage:
#   gh issue [command]

# Available Commands:
#   create      Create a new issue
#   list        List and filter issues in this repository
#   status      Show status of relevant issues
#   view        View an issue in the browser

Hmm, let’s view all of the issues:

$ gh issue list

You should see an output:

There’s also flags you can use with gh issue list. Let’s use use the --help flag to view more info:

$ gh issue list --help

You should see this documentation:

# Usage:                                       
#  gh issue list [flags]                      

# Flags:                                       
#  -a, --assignee string  Filter by assignee 
#  -l, --label strings    Filter by label   
#  -L, --limit int        Maximum number of issues to fetch
#  -s, --state string     Filter by state: {open|closed|all}

I wonder what Dan Abramov (@gaearon) has on his plate right now. Let’s run:

$ gh issue list --assignee gaearon

He has 3 issues assigned to him. It must be nice being a senior dev…

The first issue seems interesting 🤨. Let’s view it:

$ gh issue view 18085

This will actually open your default browser, and navigate to the URL. Adding the --preview flag will output directly to terminal:

$ gh issue view 18085 --preview

It’s amazing how far we got without opening a browser! So far, we’ve only looked at issues. Let’s see how gh helps us with PRs.

Pull Requests and gh

Imagine if we were one of the lead maintainers of React. One of our daily routines might involve:

• Viewing current PRs
• Reading about a certain PR
• Testing the code

Can this be accomplished with only gh? Let’s see what commands are available to us ($ gh pr --help):

# Usage:
#   gh pr [command]

# Available Commands:
#   checkout    Check out a pull request in Git
#   create      Create a pull request
#   list        List and filter pull requests in this repository
#   status      Show status of relevant pull requests
#   view        View a pull request in the browser

Ok, so let’s view all of PRs right now:

$ gh pr list

Outputs:

The first PR (#18212) seems interesting. Let’s read about it, and switch to that branch:

$ gh pr view 18212 --preview
$ gh pr checkout 18212

Outputs:

chompy@mylaptop: ~/react$ gh pr view 18212 --preview
threepointone wants to merge 1 commit into master from electron-optional-dependencies


  When we yarn/ci, we download electron only because it's listed in react-      
  devtools as a dependency. We don't seem to use it for any tests or bundles    
  though, so it's non-essential for the build. Further the electron download    
  point is flaky, leading to ci failures like this                              
  https://circleci.com/gh/facebook/react/95743 This PR simply moves electron to 
  optionalDependencies, so the build doesn't fail even if the download fails.   

View this pull request on GitHub: https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/18212
chompy@mylaptop: ~/react$ gh pr checkout 18212
From github.com:facebook/react
 * branch                refs/pull/18212/head -> FETCH_HEAD
Already up to date.

Just like that we grabbed the PR code, and switched to that branch. Pretty cool!

Repos and gh

And briefly, let’s see what gh repo can do:

# Usage:                                     
#   gh repo [command]

# Available Commands:
#   clone       Clone a repository locally
#   create      Create a new repository
#   fork        Create a fork of a repository.
#   view        View a repository in the browser.

If you’d like to start working on a new feature (or fix bugs) for the react repo, you can simply run:

$ gh repo fork

And immediately start working. After that you can create a new PR ($ gh pr create)! It’s kinda amazing that all of this functionality is available in the terminal now!

Wrap Up

The stated goal of gh is to “minimize context switching” by enabling you to remain within your terminal/editor instead of popping open your browser to visit github.com. It certainly seems to deliver because the majority of GitHub-specific features are available via gh! 💥