cli

README

GitHub CLI

gh is GitHub on the command line. It brings pull requests, issues, and other GitHub concepts to the terminal next to where you are already working with git and your code.

GitHub CLI is supported for users on GitHub.com, GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and GitHub Enterprise Server 2.20+ with support for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Documentation

For installation options see below, for usage instructions see the manual.

Contributing

If anything feels off, or if you feel that some functionality is missing, please check out the contributing page. There you will find instructions for sharing your feedback, building the tool locally, and submitting pull requests to the project.

If you are a hubber and are interested in shipping new commands for the CLI, check out our doc on internal contributions.

Installation

macOS

gh is available via Homebrew, MacPorts, Conda, Spack, Webi, and as a downloadable binary including Mac OS installer .pkg from the releases page.

[!NOTE] As of May 29th, Mac OS installer .pkg are unsigned with efforts prioritized in cli/cli#9139 to support signing them.

Homebrew

Install:	Upgrade:
brew install gh	brew upgrade gh

MacPorts

Install:	Upgrade:
sudo port install gh	sudo port selfupdate && sudo port upgrade gh

Conda

Install:	Upgrade:
conda install gh --channel conda-forge	conda update gh --channel conda-forge

Additional Conda installation options available on the gh-feedstock page.

Spack

Install:	Upgrade:
spack install gh	spack uninstall gh && spack install gh

Webi

Install:	Upgrade:
curl -sS https://webi.sh/gh | sh	webi gh@stable

For more information about the Webi installer see its homepage.

Flox

Install:	Upgrade:
flox install gh	flox upgrade toplevel

For more information about Flox, see its homepage

Linux & BSD

gh is available via:

• our Debian and RPM repositories;
• community-maintained repositories in various Linux distros;
• OS-agnostic package managers such as Homebrew, Conda, Spack, Webi; and
• our releases page as precompiled binaries.

For more information, see Linux & BSD installation.

Windows

gh is available via WinGet, scoop, Chocolatey, Conda, Webi, and as downloadable MSI.

WinGet

Install:	Upgrade:
winget install --id GitHub.cli	winget upgrade --id GitHub.cli

[!NOTE] The Windows installer modifies your PATH. When using Windows Terminal, you will need to open a new window for the changes to take effect. (Simply opening a new tab will not be sufficient.)

scoop

Install:	Upgrade:
scoop install gh	scoop update gh

Chocolatey

Install:	Upgrade:
choco install gh	choco upgrade gh

Signed MSI

MSI installers are available for download on the releases page.

Codespaces

To add GitHub CLI to your codespace, add the following to your devcontainer file:

"features": {
  "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/github-cli:1": {}
}

GitHub Actions

GitHub CLI comes pre-installed in all GitHub-Hosted Runners.

Other platforms

Download packaged binaries from the releases page.

Verification of binaries

Since version 2.50.0 gh has been producing Build Provenance Attestation enabling a cryptographically verifiable paper-trail back to the origin GitHub repository, git revision and build instructions used. The build provenance attestations are signed and relies on Public Good Sigstore for PKI.

There are two common ways to verify a downloaded release, depending if gh is aready installed or not. If gh is installed, it's trivial to verify a new release:

• Option 1: Using gh if already installed:

  $ % gh at verify -R cli/cli gh_2.62.0_macOS_arm64.zip
  Loaded digest sha256:fdb77f31b8a6dd23c3fd858758d692a45f7fc76383e37d475bdcae038df92afc for file://gh_2.62.0_macOS_arm64.zip
  Loaded 1 attestation from GitHub API
  ✓ Verification succeeded!
  
  sha256:fdb77f31b8a6dd23c3fd858758d692a45f7fc76383e37d475bdcae038df92afc was attested by:
  REPO     PREDICATE_TYPE                  WORKFLOW
  cli/cli  https://slsa.dev/provenance/v1  .github/workflows/deployment.yml@refs/heads/trunk
  

• Option 2: Using Sigstore cosign:

  To perform this, download the attestation for the downloaded release and use cosign to verify the authenticity of the downloaded release:

  $ cosign verify-blob-attestation --bundle cli-cli-attestation-3120304.sigstore.json \
        --new-bundle-format \
        --certificate-oidc-issuer="https://token.actions.githubusercontent.com" \
        --certificate-identity-regexp="^https://github.com/cli/cli/.github/workflows/deployment.yml@refs/heads/trunk$" \
        gh_2.62.0_macOS_arm64.zip
  Verified OK
  

Build from source

See here on how to build GitHub CLI from source.

Comparison with hub

For many years, hub was the unofficial GitHub CLI tool. gh is a new project that helps us explore what an official GitHub CLI tool can look like 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. Check out our more detailed explanation to learn more.