Installing gh-cli

Now, we will use brew to install the github command-line program, gh-cli. This command line program will allow you to login, sync, and clone the repositories you have access to on GitHub.

Type brew install gh in your terminal and press EnterEnter.

Installing gh with brew

When the command finishes, type gh auth login in the terminal. This will log you in to your github account. Chose GitHub, HTTPS, Yes to authenticate git, and login via browser.

gh login

To confirm that your login worked, type in gh auth status and press EnterEnter.

Now we will create an alias, or our own defined command to use with gh. Typen in the following in the terminal:

gh alias set repo-names '!gh api user/repos --paginate | jq ".[] | .full_name"'

In order for this alias to work, we need to install the jq command using brew:

brew install jq

When you run gh repo-names, it will show you a list of your GitHub repositories, as well as those you have been invited to collaborate on. This differs from the gh repo list command which will only show you your own repos. We will get back to this at a later guide.

We will also take some time to set up your git command if you have not used it before. Run the following commands (and replace Firstname and Lastname with your actual names, and example@email.com with your actual email that you use for GitHub):

Set default editor

git config --global core.editor "nano -w"

Set your name

git config --global user.name "Firstname Lastname"

Set your email

git config --global user.email "example@email.com"