Boost Your GitHub Workflow with the New GitHub CLI (gh) – A Hands‑On Guide

Overview

GitHub CLI ( gh) is an official open‑source command‑line tool for interacting with GitHub. It provides higher‑level commands for issues, pull requests, releases, and other GitHub objects, and is faster than the older hub wrapper.

Installation

gh

runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. It can be installed via package managers (e.g., brew install gh, apt-get install gh, yum install gh) or by downloading a binary from the releases page.

Key Commands

Issue management

gh issue list --label "help wanted"

Lists all issues that have the label help wanted . gh issue view 254 Shows detailed information for issue #254 and opens it in a web browser.

Pull‑request workflow

gh pr create

Interactively creates a new pull request. If no branch exists, gh automatically creates a branch and pushes it. gh pr status Displays the status of the current pull request. gh pr checkout 255 Checks out the branch associated with pull request #255.

Repository and Documentation

Source repository: https://github.com/cli/cli

Official manual: https://cli.github.com/manual/

Deprecation of hub

The original hub tool is being phased out. Its maintainer has announced a gradual reduction of activity and plans to move the project into a feature‑freeze or find new maintainers.