GitHub client

GitHub CLI

Many of us use GitHub for our day-to-day work. It is closed source, and it's now owned by Microsoft, but its CEO is also Nat Friedman of Gnome, Ximian SUSE Studio fame, and it's still used by thousands of open source projects. The way most of us interact with GitHub is via its excellent web interface. The web UI is where you typically create a pull request, review and merge other pull requests, and manage issues. But we also still use the git command to interact with the typical git processes of cloning projects, checking out branches, and updating the code. This can create an interruption in you workflow as you need to shift from the command line to a web browser, also adding to the temptation of opening Reddit or YouTube. Which is perhaps why GitHub has launched its own official, and open source, command-line client.

After installation, gh is the default command to launch the client. When you first use it, a browser session will be spawned to authenticate your account with GitHub and consequently allow the command access to your public and private repositories, as well as general access to other GitHub repositories. Hopefully, this will be the last time you'll need to use the browser, because from the command you can create a pull request (gh pr create), check out pull requests (gh pr checkout <number>), list issues (gh issue list) and view the details for a specific issue (gh issue view <number>). You can also check the status of both issues and pull requests. These commands are a huge help if you're already working on the command line, and the checkout functionality in particular lets you skip a whole chunk of copy and pasting from the web interface.

Project Website

https://github.com/cli/cli

The GitHub CLI makes you more productive by removing a web browser – and all its time-wasting temptations – from your workflow.

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