Stage 6 · Lesson 7 of 8

The GitHub CLI

The , called gh, lets you use GitHub from your terminal. gh auth login connects your account. gh repo clone owner/name a .

gh pr create opens a from your branch. gh pr checkout 42 downloads someone's pull request number 42 so you can try it. gh pr status shows the state of your pull requests and reviews, and gh run list shows recent automated test runs (CI).

It saves many trips to the browser and works well in scripts. Install it from your or the official site.

Common trapusing it as a way to skip reading the pull request on GitHub; the CLI is for speed, not for skipping review.

A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 1 cheat sheet entry come when you add the roadmap to your account. Add it

Resources for this stage

Start with· follow one of these

BookFree
Pro Git
Scott Chacon and Ben Straub
Chapter 6 covers GitHub itself: forks, pull requests and maintaining a project
GuideFree
Contributing to a Project (GitHub Docs)
GitHub · Beginner
GitHub's own walkthrough of the fork, branch and pull request workflow

Practise

First Contributions
A safe repository built for making your first pull request to someone else's project

Keep handy

Connecting to GitHub with SSH (GitHub Docs)
Official steps for generating, adding and testing SSH keys on each operating system
GitHub CLI
The gh manual for pull requests, issues and CI from the terminal

Also worth your time

Conventional CommitsRead
A widely used commit message convention you will meet in many repositories
roadmap.sh: Git and GitHubGo deeper
The GitHub half of the map: Actions, projects, security features and more