GitHub from CLI

I love open source. GitHub has a really great UI for managing open source projects in a browser. But what if I want to manage a project right in my terminal?

I have been using the GitHub CLI for half a year and it has boosted my productivity a lot. Let’s talk about typical cases.

To get started with the GitHub CLI, you need the gh package to be installed. Use brew install gh or check the official installation guide.

Issues

Imagine a situation when you forked some project to make it better. Suddenly, you encounter a bug that is not related to the changes you made. What should you do to fix it? Open a browser, find a repo, open issues, create a new one, fill it with details…

Or you can enter a simple command into the terminal.

gh issue create # will ask you for the title and body

If you prefer Web UI, add --web as an option.

gh issue create --web # will open the issue creation page

Pull Requests

What do you do when you need to check a pull request made by another developer? Find the fork url, add a new upstream, fetch the branch with changes, checkout…

Or you can get the id of a pull request (it’s 42 for the url github.com/owner/repo/pull/42) and use it as an option for gh pr.

gh pr checkout 42

Ok, we have the necessary changes. What’s next? Code review!

Yeah, gh still doesn’t allow you to leave a comment on certain lines of code. But if you just need to approve the PR or request any changes, do it from the terminal.

gh pr review --approve --body "LGFM"
# or
gh pr review --request-changes --body "Wanna more emojis"

Let’s merge the PR if it’s OK.

gh pr review --approve --body "Looks great, thank you!"
gh pr merge --squash --delete-branch

Of course, you can also open the pull request page via terminal.

gh pr view --web

What if I want to propose my changes to the project? I can do it through the web interface, but it takes too many clicks. I can use the link that git prints for me when I push the branch, it’s faster. But the fastest way is to create PR with gh.

gh pr create # will ask you for the title and body
# or
gh pr create --web # will open the PR creation page

Gists

Sometimes I need to share some code snippets with my colleagues. Gist makes it simple. And you can create gists with gh.

cat awesome.js | gh gist create # private by default

Sources

• GitHub CLI: Manual