GitHub CLI

Updated: 03 September 2023

GitHub CLI Website

Setup

For MacOS the CLI can be installed with:

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brew install gh

Once installed, you will need to log in using the CLI with:

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gh auth login

For help on any command, as usual, you can append --help to the command you’re trying to use for more details

PR functionality is contained under gh repo

To create a repo you can use:

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gh repo create

And then follow the prompts

To clone a repo you can use the gh repo clone command with the name of the repo, for example to clone the repo that this file is in:

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gh repo clone nabeelvalley/docs

PR functionality is contained under gh pr

You can create a pull request using:

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gh pr create

If you don’t give it any args with the required data then the CLI open the interactive menu to select any required data

Some of the params that I use frequently when creating a PR are --title, --labels, and --reviewer

A PR with the above may look like so:

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gh pr create --title "Add some cool feature" --labels feature,cool --reviewer nabeelvalley

A draft PR can also be created by appending --draft to an PR related command, e.g.

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gh pr create  --draft

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gh pr create --title "Add some cool feature" --labels feature,cool --reviewer nabeelvalley --draft

You can list PRs using

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gh pr list

Additionally, you can do things like searching and the like using the various flags, e.g. to check for PRs with a specific labels:

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gh pr list --labels feature,cool

Or a more complex version which looks for only closed PRs and limits the output to 100

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gh pr list -s closed --limit 100

Which will get PRs that have both the feature and cool label

Each of the CLI commands that output data let you get the data in JSON format along with specific fields

To use the JSON output, append the --json flag followed by a list of the JSON fields you’d like to see

The following is an example that uses one of the PR commands above with the JSON output with author and pr labels

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gh pr list -s closed --limit 100 --json author,labels