GitHub CLI offers an easier and more seamless way to work with GitHub from the command line. It was introduced as a beta in February this year, and GitHub CLI 1.0 has been finally made available today.
GitHub allows developers to build software collaboratively, and GitHub CLI brings that experience to your terminal. gh is GitHub on the command line and brings pull requests, issues, and other GitHub concepts to the terminal next to where you are already working with git and your code. It reduces context switching and enables developers to script and create their own workflows more easily.
With GitHub CLI 1.0, you can:
- Run your entire GitHub workflow from the terminal, from issues through releases
- Call the GitHub API to script nearly any action, and set a custom alias for any command
- Connect to GitHub Enterprise Server in addition to GitHub.com
The official blog post states that since the beta was released, users have created over 250,000 pull requests, performed over 350,000 merges, and created over 20,000 issues with GitHub CLI.
Before GitHub CLI, hub was the unofficial command-line tool for GitHub. gh is now an official GitHub CLI tool with a fundamentally different design. While both tools bring GitHub to the terminal, hub behaves as a proxy to git, and gh is a standalone tool.
GitHub CLI is available for repositories hosted on GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise Server 2.20+, and to install on macOS, Windows, and Linux. It"s free and open-source, of course. While it was only available for GitHub Team and Enterprise Cloud during the beta, the CLI is now also available for GitHub Enterprise Server.
Source: GitHub