Mateusz Jędrzejewski is a DevOps Engineer at Nethermind. In this post, he reviews Github’s new command line tool, which brings pull requests, issues, and other GitHub concepts to the terminal next to where you are already working.

The Github CLI v 1.0 has been announced on the 17th of September this year and I’ve just jumped straight into exploring and playing with this release. It comes with many new features that can be helpful for any person using Github on a daily basis. Personally, I am a fan of CLI tools and I use them wherever possible. I believe that this release will settle in my terminals for good. Let us see what it has to offer and check some of the most useful commands. The full documentation containing all available commands can be found here.

gh alias

One of the most useful features of the CLI. Is very helpful when we want to create shortcuts for various gh commands and have the ability to combine them. By using gh alias you can either set an alias, delete it or display a list of current aliases. We can make the alias even more flexible by passing command-line arguments such as $1, $2, and so on. For example, you can create an alias which will display a list of issues by a label:

gh alias set ibl 'issue list –label="$1"'

gh repo

The quick ability to clone a Github repository by providing the OWNER/REPO names only. We need to use -- --recursive flag if we want to clone the repository recursively.

Like this:

gh repo clone nethermindeth/nethermind -- --recursive

It might be also useful to set an alias for this so that we can re-use this command in the future

gh alias set nethermind 'repo clone nethermindeth/nethermind -- --recursive'

which then can be used by simply typing

gh nethermind

gh repocomes with the ability to create a repo by saying gh repo create and then going through the dialog or by passing arguments to the command. Forking the repository withgh repo fork OWNER/REPOcan be a handy tool as well.

gh release

The gh release comes with a set of very nice commands which can enhance your CI/CD experience by automating your processes of release creation. We can for example quickly create a release with notes uploaded directly from the changelog, mark it as a pre-release and give it some title:

gh release create 1.8.106 -p -F changelog.md -t v1.8.106

We can also quickly download, upload specific assets to the releases by saying:

gh release download 1.8.105 -p 'nethermind-linux-*'

and it will download only those assets that match a glob pattern of nethermind-linux-*

gh pr

gh pris designed to make life easier when managing the pull requests. With these commands, we can have a full overview of the PR somebody created or we can create our own. We can close, review, reopen, and perform many other actions that we normally do through the web.

Let’s display a list of a current PR’s outstanding in the repo:

gh pr list

gh pr list

checkout to the one we would like to work on:

gh pr checkout 2303

and see whether the required checks from Github Actions have passed, there is a nice overview of each job including the running time and direct links.

gh pr checks 2303

gh pr checks pr_no

We can also have a nice overview of the PR by typing gh pr status .

gh pr status

What I also really like is the possibility to create a new PR with gh pr create and passing arguments of our need mentioned here.

It is very useful when it comes to automating the PR creation process.

gh issue

The gh issue the command is great when you need to quickly create, close, or simply view the issue you would like to work on. For example, we can list the issues that are assigned to us to see what we would like to take today with:

gh issue list -a matilote

gh issue list -a username

Then view the issue to see more details:

gh issue view 1849

gh issue view issue_no

To have an overview of the status of the current issue that was either assigned to us, opened or we were mentioned in one of them.

gh issue status

gh issue status

gh gist

The gh gist command allows the user to work on the Github gists. The one I find the most useful for myself was the gh gist create filename.sh -d 'Filename description'which creates a gist with its relevant description. We can also make the gist public by adding -por --public flags.

gh gist create filename

gh config

It simply allows the user to manage their gh configuration. Nothing much is going on here.

gh auth

Probably used the least. It provides options to authenticate the user, login, logout refresh, or view the authentication status.

gh api

The gh api command allows us to perform Github API HTTP requests and receive responses. For those who prefer graphql (grants access to Github API v4) queries it's also available. To display a list of tags for a given repo you can type something like this:

gh api repos/nethermindeth/nethermind/tags

You can use any available endpoint of Github API v3 e.g. to get the list of repository runs

gh api repos/nethermindeth/nethermind/actions/runs

You can then use the power of the most popular JSON parsing command-line tool jq and grab everything you need from the API responses.

Conclusion

The fact that this project is community-driven is amazing. The new Github CLI is quite promising and is definitely able to make the life of devs easier, especially by setting up aliases for multiple commands with some additional arguments that the user can pass. To make our work more efficient I would love to see gh actions commands in the future, that would allow the user to perform actions such as viewing the status of currently running GH Actions runs (something like gh pr checks output) and manipulating them by cancelling or rerunning. I found the gh release commands very useful for the CI/CD processes. The gh api command can be easily replaced with simple `curl` requests, as it is a little bit simpler, I use it for tracking the release assets downloads over time. I’ve already made some aliases that will surely become a good companion for my daily DevOps tasks.

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