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Pradipta Sarma
Pradipta Sarma

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Day 1 with the Github CLI 1.0

Originally posted on my blog

GitHub finally launch their CLI, versioned 1.0 after 7 months of having it in Beta. Done with Cmd+Tab / Ctrl+tab to move to the browser. Do it all at one place.

You can install the GitHub CLI on you laptop and can perform entire GitHub's workflow right from the terminal, starting from creating an issue, reviewing a PR, to merging a PR.

You can create aliases against any commands.
You can also use GitHub APIs to trigger Actions.

Visit this link for the official documentation.

To install Github CLI, open the terminal and run:

brew install gh [Mac]

sudo apt-add-repository https://cli.github.com/packages && sudo apt update && sudo apt install gh [Linux]

scoop bucket add github-gh https://github.com/cli/scoop-gh.git [Windows]

brew install gh

gh help

After the installation, we need to authenticate the CLI with our GitHub Account. For that, run gh auth login and proceed with the instructions that follow.

gh auth login

On a successful login, we now can perform all the workflows of GitHub, for which, previously, we had to open the browser, right from the terminal.

Let's look at some of them.

gh repo clone <repo name>
gh repo clone

A gh repo view would show us the Readme for the repo, if any.

We can create an issue on a repo using gh issue create and entering the details that it asks for.

gh issue create

I created a new branch and made some changes, commited them and pushed it to the branch. To raise a PR, I previously had to go to GitHub.com on my browser and raise it from there. No more. All you need is: gh pr create

gh pr create

We can also perform PR reviews from the CLI. I haven't tried out reviewing a big PR on it to put my thoughts about it. But yes, we can. We can approve, leave comments, or request for changes right from the CLI.
gh pr approve

Also, have it merged.
gh pr merge

This is just an overview, there are a whole lot of commands we need to play around and try out.

One of the best things: to create a new repo, we donot need to do a git init, Create Repo on GitHub.com, and git remote add origin .... It is just a command on the CLI.

Happy Git!

Top comments (2)

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bobbyiliev profile image
Bobby Iliev

Great post! Well done!

I wrote a similar post on how to get started with GitHub CLI about a week ago.

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pradipta profile image
Pradipta Sarma

Thanks a lot. Awesome read. Good things!