Ubuntu Manpage: gcli — interact with git forges without using a web-browser

name
synopsis
description
subcommands
options
environment
files
examples
see also
history
authors
caveats
bugs

NAME

     gcli — interact with git forges without using a web-browser

SYNOPSIS

     gcli [overrides] subcommand [options]

DESCRIPTION

     gcli can be used to interact with git(1) forges like GitHub, GitLab and Gitea from the command line in
     order to make many tasks like managing issues and pull requests easier.

     Calls to gcli usually consist of either only the subcommand to list requested data or the subcommand plus
     further subcommands or options to perform various tasks. Some commands may also take an item to operate on
     and accept multiple actions that will be performed on the item (e.g. PRs may be summarized, comments
     fetched and a diff printed all in one command).

     The default behaviour of gcli can be overridden to accommodate more nuanced use cases. Manual overrides
     must be passed before subcommands and their options.

SUBCOMMANDS

     Most of these subcommands are documented in dedicated man pages.

     issues      Issues in repositories. See gcli-issues(1).

     pulls       Pull Requests on repositories. See gcli-pulls(1).

     labels      Manage labels for issues and pull/merge requests on repositories. See gcli-labels(1).

     forks       Forking repositories. See gcli-forks(1).

     gists       Github Gists are like paste bins to where you can dump code snippets etc. See gcli-gists(1).

     snippets    Support for Gitlab snippets. See gcli-snippets(1).

     repos       Manage your own or other repositories. See gcli-repos(1).

     comment     Submit comments under issues and PRs. See gcli-comment(1).

     status      Print a list of TODOs and/or notifications. See gcli-status(1).

     pipelines   Inspect and manage Gitlab Pipelines. See gcli-pipelines(1).

     releases    Create and manage releases. See gcli-releases(1).

     milestones  List and manage milestones. See gcli-milestones(1).

     config      Change user settings for the forge. Allows you to e.g. upload or delete ssh keys. See
                 gcli-config(1).

     api         Perform direct queries to the API and dump the JSON response to stdout. This is primarily
                 intended to assist debugging gcli. See gcli-api(1).

     version     Print version and exit.

OPTIONS

gcli overrides are:

-a, --account override-account
Manually override the default account. override-account must name a config section for an account
in the global config file. See FILES.

-r, --remote override-remote
Use override-remote as the remote when trying to infer repository data.

-c, --colours
Ignore NO_COLOR as well as whether the output is not tty and print ANSI escape sequences for
changing text formatting. Default is to output colours unless stdout is not a tty. See isatty(3).
This is useful in combination with modern pagers such as less(1).

-q, --quiet
Suppresses most output of gcli.

-v, --verbose
Be very verbose. This means that warnings about missing config files and request steps are printed
to stderr.

-t, --type forge-type
Forcefully override the forge type. Set forge-type to ‘github’, ‘gitlab’ ‘gitea’, or ‘bugzilla’ to
connect to the corresponding services.

Common options across almost all of the subcommands are:

-s, --sorted
Reverse the output such that most recent items appear at the bottom.

-n, --count n
Fetch multiple items of data. The default is usually 30 items, but this parameter allows to fetch
more than that. Setting n to -1 will result in all pages being queried and all items being read.
However, be careful with that, since if there is a lot of data to be fetched, it may result in rate
limiting by the Github API, aside from the fact that it may also take a considerable amount of time
to process.

-a, --all
Fetch all data, including closed issues and closed/merged PRs.

-y, --yes
Do not ask for confirmation when performing destructive operations or performing submissions.
Always assume yes.

-o, --owner owner
Operate on the given owner (organization or user). Can only be used in combination with -r.

-r, --repo repo
Operate on the given repository. Can only be used in combination with -o.

-i id Operate on the given numeric identifier.

Other options specific to the context are documented in the respective man pages.

ENVIRONMENT

     EDITOR           If the gcli config file does not name an editor, gcli may use this editor.

     XDG_CONFIG_HOME  There should be a subdirectory called gcli in the directory this environment variable
                      points to where gcli will go looking for its configuration file. See FILES.

     GCLI_ACCOUNT     Specifies an account name that should be used instead of an inferred one. The value of
                      GCLI_ACCOUNT can be overridden again by using -a account-name.  This is helpful in cases
                      where you have multiple accounts of the same forge-type configured and you don't want to
                      use the default.

     NO_COLOR         If set to ‘1’, ‘y or’ ‘yes’ (capitalization ignored) this will suppress output of ANSI
                      colour escape sequences. See OPTIONS (--colours).

FILES

     ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/gcli/config  The user configuration file for gcli. It contains account definitions as
                                     well as sensible default values. See gcli(5).

     .gcli                           A repo-specific config file intended to be committed into the repo so that
                                     users don't have to manually specify all the options like --in, --from,
                                     --base -etc. when creating pull requests. See gcli(5) for details about
                                     this file.

EXAMPLES

     List recently opened issues in the current upstream repository:

           $ gcli issues

     Merge upstream PR #22:

           $ gcli pulls -p 22 merge

     Get a summary and comments of upstream PR #22:

           $ gcli pulls -p 22 summary comments

     Establish a connection to github and print the last 10 pull requests in contour-terminal/contour regardless
     of their state.

           $ gcli -t github pulls -o contour-terminal -r contour -a -n10

     This can be useful if neither your config file nor the directory you're working from contain the relevant
     forge and repository information.

HISTORY

     The idea for gcli appeared during a long rant on IRC where the issue with the official tool written by
     GitHub became clear to be the manual dialing and DNS resolving by the Go runtime, circumventing almost the
     entirety of the IP and DNS services of the operating system and leaking sensitive information when using
     Tor.

     Implementation started in October 2021 with the goal of having a decent, sufficiently portable and secure
     version of a cli utility to interact with the GitHub world without using the inconvenient web interface.

     Later, support for GitLab and Gitea (Codeberg) were added.

AUTHORS

     Nico Sonack aka. herrhotzenplotz <nsonack@herrhotzenplotz.de> and contributors.

CAVEATS

     Not all features that are available from the web version are available in gcli.  However, it is a non-goal
     of the project to provide all this functionality.

BUGS

     There is an undocumented ci subcommand available for GitHub CI services. The subcommand is undocumented as
     it is not well tested and likely subject to changes.

     Please report bugs via E-Mail to ~herrhotzenplotz/gcli-discuss@lists.sr.ht.

     Alternatively you can report them on any of the forges linked at https://herrhotzenplotz.de/gcli. However,
     the preferred and quickest method is to use the mailing list.

     You may also report an issue like so:

           $ gcli -a some-gitlab-account \
                   issues create \
                   -o herrhotzenplotz -r gcli \
                   "BUG : ..."