GitHub's Go-powered CLI

In this episode we discuss Mislav’s experience building not one, but two Github CLIs - hub and gh. We dive into questions like, “What lead to the decision to completely rewrite the CLI in Go?”, “How were you testing the CLI, especially during the transition?”, and “What Go libraries are you using to build your CLI?”

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Featuring

• Mislav Marohnić – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Jon Calhoun – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Johnny Boursiquot – Twitter, GitHub, Website

Notes and Links

• The Official Github CLI repo on Github
• The Official Github CLI website
• hub, the original Github CLI - This is the project that eventually lead to the creation of the CLI linked above.
• The past and the future of hub - Mislav wrote an article talking about his experience building hub and some of the challenges.
• Kubectl CLI - Another CLI that was examined when determining how to build the Github CLI and what libraries to consider.
• Github CLI’s go.mod file - Github’s go.mod file has all of the third party libraries they use in the CLI. Useful for anyone starting with a new CLI.
• Git command line tool - The original hub CLI wrapped git.
• More GitHub-focused podcasts on Changelog.com

Episode source