Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at 🖥️ GitHub CLI Cheatsheet.

If you’ve ever wished you could do everything GitHub-related without leaving your terminal, the GitHub CLI tool, known as gh, is exactly what you need. It lets you manage repositories, pull requests, issues, releases, and more, all from the command line.

Let’s start with getting it installed. On Windows, you can install it using either Chocolatey or winget by running the install command for GitHub dot cli. On a Mac, Homebrew handles it with a simple brew install. On Linux, you can use apt. Once installed, you can verify everything worked by checking the version. Then you authenticate by running gh auth login, which walks you through an interactive setup where you choose GitHub dot com, pick SSH or HTTPS, and generate an access token. If you already have a token in a file, you can pipe that file directly into the login command to skip the prompts.

To check your current login state, you run gh auth status. To log out, gh auth logout. Simple.

Now, working with repositories. You can clone any repo by passing the owner and repo name to gh repo clone. You can even specify a destination folder as a second argument. To view information about a repo, you use gh repo view, either for your current directory or by naming the owner and repo. Tacking on the web flag opens it straight in your browser. You can list all repos under an organisation, filter for archived ones, or cap the results with a limit flag. Creating a new repo is just gh repo create, with options to make it private and add a description. Forking works similarly with gh repo fork, and adding the clone flag pulls it down to your machine at the same time.

Pull requests are where the CLI really shines. You create one with gh pr create, and you can specify a title, a body description, a base branch, a head branch, or mark it as a draft, all as flags on that same command. To see what’s open, gh pr list, filtered by state, author, or base branch as needed. You can view a specific PR by number, check its CI status with gh pr checks, request a review, approve it, request changes with a comment, or leave a comment yourself. Merging is flexible too: you can squash, rebase, or create a standard merge commit, and you can automatically delete the branch after merging. Closing or reopening a PR is just one command each.

Issues follow the same pattern. You create them with a title, body, and labels. You list them filtered by state, assignee, or label. You view, close with an optional comment, reopen, comment on, or edit them to change titles or add and remove labels.

For GitHub Actions, gh run list shows your recent workflow runs. You can view details and logs for a specific run by its ID, download artifacts, trigger a workflow manually if it supports that, and list all available workflows in your repository.

Releases are just as straightforward. You can list them, view a specific one by tag, create a new release with a title, or let GitHub auto-generate release notes from your merged pull requests. You can mark a release as a draft or a pre-release, upload assets like zip files to an existing release, edit it later, or delete it entirely.

Branch operations in the CLI lean on the gh api command, which lets you talk directly to the GitHub REST API. You can list branches, create one by passing a reference name and a commit hash, or delete one by sending a delete request to the reference endpoint.

For discussions, you can create one with a title, body, and category, then list discussions filtering for answered or unanswered ones, or view a specific discussion by its ID.

Label management is clean: list labels, create one with a name, a hex colour code, and a description, edit an existing label, or delete it.

You can also set up aliases in your git config to shortcut common gh commands. For example, mapping pr-create to gh pr create, or status to gh pr checks, so your muscle memory works even faster.

Finally, a few handy one-liners worth knowing. You can open your current repo in the browser with a single command. You can push a branch and immediately create a pull request in one chained command. You can merge and delete the branch in one go. You can create a release from your latest git tag and auto-generate the notes. And you can list all pull requests waiting specifically for your review by searching for your username in the reviewer-requested filter.

That covers the full GitHub CLI toolkit, from setup and authentication through to repos, pull requests, issues, actions, releases, branches, labels, and discussions.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.