Supercharge your command line experience: GitHub CLI is now in beta

We’re introducing an easier and more seamless way to work with GitHub from the command line—GitHub CLI, now in beta. Millions of developers rely on GitHub to make building software more fun and collaborative, and gh brings the GitHub experience right to your terminal.

You can install GitHub CLI today on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and there’s more to come as we iterate on your feedback from the beta. It’s available today for GitHub Team and Enterprise Cloud, but not yet available for GitHub Enterprise Server. We’ll be exploring support for Enterprise Server when it’s out of beta.

How can you use GitHub CLI?

We started with issues and pull requests because many developers use them every day. Check out a few examples of how gh can improve your experience when contributing to an open source project and learn more from the manual.

Filter lists to your needs

Find an open source project you want to contribute to and clone the repository. And then, to see where maintainers want community contributions, use gh to filter the issues to only show those with help wanted labels.

Quickly view the details

Find an issue describing a bug that seems like something you can fix, and use gh to quickly open it in the browser to get all the details you need to get started.

Create a pull request

Create a branch, make several commits to fix the bug described in the issue, and use gh to create a pull request to share your contribution.

By using GitHub CLI to create pull requests, it also automatically creates a fork when you don’t already have one, and it pushes your branch and creates your pull request to get your change merged.

View the status of your work

Get a quick snapshot the next morning of what happened since you created your pull request. gh shows the review and check status of your pull requests.

Easily check out pull requests

One of the maintainers reviewed your pull request and requested changes. You probably switched branches since then, so use gh to checkout the pull request branch. We never remember the right commands either!

Make the changes, push them, and soon enough the pull request is merged—congratulations!

Help shape GitHub CLI

We hope you’ll love the foundation we’ve built with pull requests and issues. And we’re even more excited about the future as we explore what it looks like to build a truly delightful experience with GitHub on the command line. As GitHub CLI continues to make it even more seamless to contribute to projects on GitHub, the sky’s the limit on what we can achieve together.

We can’t wait to hear about your experience with GitHub CLI, and we’d love your feedback. Create an issue in our open source repository or provide feedback in our google form. What commands feel like you can’t live without them? What’s clunky or missing? Let us know so we can make GitHub CLI even better.

Learn more about GitHub CLI beta

Written by

Billy Griffin

@billygriffin