GCLI-TUTORIAL(1)

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version 2.13.0 · 4 versions
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🦋 gcli-tutorial(1) — Tutorial of GCLI 🦋

okay so bestie, this is the Tutorial of GCLI — specifically the Generated Offline Version of https://herrhotzenplotz.de/gcli/tutorial. It lives in the General Commands Manual as gcli-tutorial(1). Grab a snack, we're going on a journey 💖

✨ Installing GCLI ✨

📦 Through package manager

If you're on FreeBSD you can literally just install gcli by running:

# pkg install gcli

On NetBSD you can run:

# pkgin install gcli

On Ubuntu, Debian, Devuan and the like you can run:

# apt install gcli

On ArchLinux you can either use the AUR manually or use your favourite AUR helper:

# yay -S gcli

🔨 Compile the source code

Other operating systems may currently require manual compilation and installation. yeah, ikr, the audacity.

🪟 Windows NT Notes

It is entirely possible to build gcli on Windows using MSYS2. Please follow their instructions on how to set up a development environment. slay.

🛠️ Generic build instructions

For this purpose go to https://herrhotzenplotz.de/gcli/releases and choose the latest release. Then download one of the tarballs.

For version 1.1.0 this would be:

https://herrhotzenplotz.de/gcli/releases/gcli-1.1.0/gcli-1.1.0.tar.xz

Now that you have a link, you can download it, extract it, compile the code and install it:

$ mkdir ~/build
$ cd ~/build
$ curl -4LO https://herrhotzenplotz.de/gcli/releases/gcli-1.1.0/gcli-1.1.0.tar.xz
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  342k  100  342k    0     0  2739k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 2736k
$ ls
gcli-1.1.0.tar.xz
$

Install the dependencies for building gcli:

e.g. on Debian systems:

# apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev pkgconf build-essential

or on MSYS2:

$ pacman -S libcurl-devel pkgconf

Extract the tarball:

$ tar xf gcli-1.1.0.tar.xz
$ cd gcli-1.1.0

Configure, build and install gcli:

$ ./configure
...
$ make
...
$ make install

Check that the shell finds gcli:

$ which gcli
/usr/local/bin/gcli
$
$ gcli version
gcli 1.1.0 (amd64-unknown-freebsd13.2)
Using libcurl/8.1.2 OpenSSL/1.1.1t zlib/1.2.13 libpsl/0.21.2 (+libidn2/2.3.4) libssh2/1.11.0 nghttp2/1.53.0
Using vendored pdjson library
Report bugs at https://gitlab.com/herrhotzenplotz/gcli/.
Copyright 2021, 2022, 2023 Nico Sonack <nsonack@herrhotzenplotz.de> and contributors.
$

🪟✨ Advanced Windows Environment Setup

In case you want to use the installed gcli from outside MSYS2 (e.g. in cmd.exe) you may wish to update the Path environment variable and add the C:\msys2\usr\bin directory to it. Make sure you have the library paths set up correctly. no cap, this one bites people.

🌸 First steps 🌸

🐛 Listing issues

Let's start off by listing some issues — here for the curl project which is hosted on GitHub under curl/curl. To list issues for it one would run:

$ gcli -t github issues -o curl -r curl

You will see the list of the 30 most recent open issue tickets. The command above does the following:

  • invoke gcli
  • as a global option we switch it into GitHub-Mode
  • invoke the issues subcommand
  • operate on the repository owner curl (-o curl)
  • operate on the repository curl (-r curl)

Note that the -t github option goes before the issues subcommand because it is a global option for gcli that affects how all the following things like subcommands operate.

However, now I also want to see closed issues:

$ gcli -t github issues -o curl -r curl -a

The -a option will disregard the status of the issue.

Oh and the screen is a bit cluttered by all these tickets — let's only fetch the first 10 issues:

$ gcli -t github issues -o curl -r curl -n10

gcli also accepts a shorthand that combines the forge, owner and repository into a single argument — gh:curl/curl is equivalent to -t github -o curl -r curl:

$ gcli issues gh:curl/curl -a -n10

The prefix sets the forge: gh: for GitHub, gl: for GitLab, cb: for Codeberg. It works with any subcommand. The examples in this tutorial continue to use the explicit flags for clarity.

🔍 Searching for issues

Before reporting a bug or looking for solutions to a problem that you found in a program you may want to search for issues.

Let's search for avast in curl/curl:

$ gcli -t github issues -o curl -r curl -a avast
NUMBER  NOTES  STATE   TITLE
 11383      9  open    Issue with FileZilla server (GnuTLS) and close_notify
 10551      7  closed  Unable to use curl 7.87 for SSL connections on Windows 10 Pro
  8848      2  closed  CURL SSL certificate problem when AVAST HTTPS scanning enabled
$

As you can see searching for something is just a matter of appending keywords to the issues subcommand. You can specify any amount of search terms — they will all be used in the query. Again, -a ignores the status of the issue such that we also see closed tickets.

👀 Examining issues

As of now we only produced lists of issues. However, we may also want to look at the details of an issue such as:

  • the original post
  • labels
  • comments
  • assignees of the issue (that is someone who is working on the bug)

Let's get a good summary of issue #11268 in the curl project:

$ gcli -t github issues -o curl -r curl -i 11268 all

As you can see most of the options are the same, however now we tell gcli with the -i 11268 option that we want to work with a single issue. Then we tell gcli what actions to perform on the issue. Another important action is comments. Guess what it does:

$ gcli -t github issues -o curl -r curl -i 11268 comments

I know a person that likes to post long verbose traces. Let's search for an issue authored by them on the OpenSSL GitHub page:

$ gcli -t github issues -o openssl -r openssl -A blastwave -a
NUMBER  STATE   TITLE
 20379  open    test "80-test_ssl_new.t" fails on Solaris 10 SPARCv9
 10547  open    Strict C90 CFLAGS results in sha.h:91 ISO C90 does not support long long
  8048  closed  OPENSSL_strnlen SIGSEGV in o_str.c line 76
$

The -A option lets you filter for specific authors.

Let's look at the issue state of #10547:

$ gcli -t github issues -o openssl -r openssl -i 10547 status
     NAME : 10547
    TITLE : Strict C90 CFLAGS results in sha.h:91 ISO C90 does not support long long
  CREATED : 2019-12-01T04:35:23Z
   AUTHOR : blastwave
    STATE : open
 COMMENTS : 9
   LOCKED : no
   LABELS : triaged: bug
ASSIGNEES : none
$

That's nine comments — let's read the original post and the comments in our favourite pager less:

$ gcli -t github issues -o openssl -r openssl -i 10547 op comments | less

As you can see gcli will accept multiple actions for an issue and executes them sequentially.

📚 How to find documentation 📚

When using gcli one may not always remember all the options and flags for every subcommand. gcli has lots of integrated help to guide you through its commands. it's giving helpful 💅

❓ Subcommand help

You can list all available options for the issues subcommand by doing:

$ gcli issues --help

With your current knowledge you can also explore the gcli pulls subcommand.

🧭 General usage

Run the following command:

$ gcli --help
usage: gcli [options] subcommand

OPTIONS:
  -a account     Use the configured account instead of inferring it
  -r remote      Infer account from the given git remote
  -t type        Force the account type:
                    - github (default: github.com)
                    - gitlab (default: gitlab.com)
                    - gitea (default: codeberg.org)
  -c             Force colour and text formatting.
  -q             Be quiet. (Not implemented yet)

  -v             Be verbose.

SUBCOMMANDS:
  ci             Github CI status info
  comment        Comment under issues and PRs
  config         Configure forges
  forks          Create, delete and list repository forks
  gists          Create, fetch and list Github Gists
  issues         Manage issues
  labels         Manage issue and PR labels
  milestones     Milestone handling
  pipelines      Gitlab CI management
  pulls          Create, view and manage PRs
  releases       Manage releases of repositories
  repos          Remote Repository management
  snippets       Fetch and list Gitlab snippets
  status         General user status and notifications
  api            Fetch plain JSON info from an API (for debugging purposes)
  version        Print version

gcli 1.2.0 (amd64-unknown-freebsd13.2)
Using libcurl/8.1.2 OpenSSL/1.1.1t zlib/1.2.13 libpsl/0.21.2 (+libidn2/2.3.4) libssh2/1.11.0 nghttp2/1.53.0
Using vendored pdjson library
Report bugs at https://gitlab.com/herrhotzenplotz/gcli/.
Copyright 2021, 2022, 2023 Nico Sonack <nsonack@herrhotzenplotz.de> and contributors.

This gives you an overview over all the available subcommands. Each subcommand in turn allows you to get its usage by supplying the --help option to it.

📖 Manual pages

Furthermore I recommend reading into the manual page gcli-issues(1) and gcli-pulls(1):

$ man gcli-issues
$ man gcli-pulls

🔐 Setting up gcli for use with an account 🔐

Creating issues on GitHub requires an account which we need to generate an authentication token for gcli.

If you want to test this with a different forge than GitHub look at the tutorial for other forges.

Log into your GitHub account and click on your account icon in the top right corner. Then choose the Settings option. Scroll down and choose Developer settings on the bottom of the left column. Under Personal access tokens choose Tokens (classic).

Click on Generate new token (classic).

Set a useful name such as gcli in the Note field, set the expiration to No expiration and allow the following Scopes:

  • repo
  • workflow
  • admin:public_key
  • gist

Then create the token. It'll be printed in green. Do not share it! 🚫 like fr fr, that's your whole identity bestie.

Now we need to tell gcli about this new token. To do this, create a configuration file for gcli — on Windows you need to do this from the MSYS2 Shell:

$ mkdir -p ${HOME}/.config/gcli
$ vi ${HOME}/.config/gcli/config

Obviously, you can choose any other editor of your choice. Put the following into this file:

defaults {
    editor=vi
    github-default-account=my-github-account
}

my-github-account {
    token=<token-goes-here>
    account=<account-name>
    forge-type=github
}

Replace the <token-goes-here> with the previously generated token and the <account> with your account name.

If you now run

$ gcli -t github repos

you should get a list of your repos. If not, check again that you did all the steps above correctly. 🫶

Creating an issue 🐛✨

Note: this whole thing assumes you already set up gcli with a GitHub account, bestie. No account, no issue. 💅

Preparation 🎀

For this case I have a playground repository that you may as well use for testing with gcli. It is available at herrhotzenplotz/ghcli-playground.

To see a list of issues, we can run:

$ gcli -t github issues -o herrhotzenplotz -r ghcli-playground -a
NUMBER  NOTES  STATE   TITLE
    13      0  open    yet another issue
    12      0  closed  wat
    11      0  closed  blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
    10      0  closed  "this is the quoted" issue title? anyone?"
     9      0  closed  test
     8      0  closed  foobar
     7      0  closed  foobar
     5      0  closed  test2
     4      0  closed  test
$

look at all those closed ones, the playground has seen things 😭

Invoke gcli 🦋

Let's create a bug report where we complain about things not working:

$ gcli -t github issues create -o herrhotzenplotz -r ghcli-playground \
    "Bug: Doesn't work on my machine"

The message "Bug: doesn't work on my machine" is the title of the issue.

Original Post 💖

You will see the default editor come up and instruct you to type in a message. This message is the "original post" or the body of the issue ticket that you're about to submit. You can use Markdown Syntax:

 I tried building this code on my machine but unfortunately it errors
 out with the following message:

$ make love make: don't know how to make love. Stop

make: stopped in /tmp/wat $


What am I doing wrong?

! ISSUE TITLE : Bug: Doesn't work on my machine
! Enter issue description above.
! All lines starting with '!' will be discarded.

Submit the issue 🌸

After you save and exit the editor gcli gives you a chance to check back and finally submit the issue. Type 'y' and hit enter.

You can check back if the issue was created and also view details about it as you learned earlier.

Commenting 💬

Discussions on GitHub and the like are done through comments. You can comment on issues and pull requests.

Reviewing a discussion 👀

Say you were looking at an issue in curl/curl:

$ gcli issues -o curl -r curl -i 11461 comments

Create the comment ✍️

And now you wish to respond to this thread:

$ gcli comment -o curl -r curl -i 11461

This will now open the editor and lets you type in your message. After saving and exiting gcli will ask you to confirm. Type 'y' and hit enter:

$ gcli -t github comment -o curl -r curl -i 11461
You will be commenting the following in curl/curl #11461:

Is this okay? [yN] y
$

Commenting on pull requests 🫶

When you want to comment under a pull request use the -p flag instead of the -i flag to indicate the PR number.

Creating a pull request 👑

Creating a pull request with gcli is usually as simple as running

$ gcli pulls create

Preparation 🧚

Suppose you have a git repository forked and cloned:

$ git clone git@github.com:contour-terminal/contour
$ cd contour
$ gcli forks create --into herrhotzenplotz

Then you do some work on whatever feature you're planning to submit:

$ git checkout -b my-amazing-feature
<hackhackhack>
$ git add -p
$ git commit

Push your changes 🚀

You then push your changes to your fork:

$ git push origin my-amazing-feature

Create the pull request 🎉

Now you can run the command to create the pull request:

$ gcli pulls create
From (owner:branch) [herrhotzenplotz:my-amazing-feature]:
Owner [contour-terminal]:
Repository [contour]:
To Branch [master]:
Title: Add new amazing feature
Enable automerge? [yN]:

Most of the defaults you should be able to simply accept. This assumes that you have the source branch checked out locally and remotes are configured appropriately.

Otherwise you can just change the defaults by entering the correct values.

Enter original post 📝

After you entered all the meta data of the pull request gcli will drop you into your editor and lets you enter a message for the pull request.

Submit ✅

After you saved and exit type y and hit enter to submit the pull request.

Other forges and bugtrackers 🌈

gcli is capable of not only interacting with Github. It also currently supports:

  • GitLab
  • Gitea
  • Bugzilla

Bugzilla 🐞

Notes 📌

Bugzilla is commonly used as a bug tracker in various large open-source projects such as FreeBSD, the Linux Kernel, Mozilla and Gentoo.

Searching 🔍

Suppose you want to search for bug reports containing sparc in the Gentoo Bugzilla.

In this case you need to configure an account that points at the correct URL in $HOME/.config/gcli/config by adding:

gentoo {
    forge-type=bugzilla
    api-base=https://bugs.gentoo.org/
}

Now you can search the Gentoo Bugs:

$ gcli -a gentoo issues sparc
NUMBER  NOTES  STATE        TITLE
924443      0  UNCONFIRMED  Add keyword ~sparc for app-misc/fastfetch
924430      0  RESOLVED     media-libs/assimp-5.3.1 fails tests on sparc
924215      0  CONFIRMED    dev-libs/libbson dev-libs/mongo-c-driver: alpha arm ia64 mips ppc ppc64 s390 sparc keyword req
924191      0  CONFIRMED    media-libs/exempi: unaligned access causes dev-python/python-xmp-toolkit-2.0.2 to fails tests on sparc (test_file_to_dict (test.test_core_unit.UtilsTestCase.test_file_to_dict) ... Bus error)
924180      0  CONFIRMED    dev-python/psycopg-3.1.17[native-extensions] fails tests on sparc: tests/test_copy_async.py::test_read_rows[asyncio-names-1] Fatal Python error: Bus error
924031      0  IN_PROGRESS  sys-apps/bfs: ~arm ~arm64 ~ppc ~ppc64 ~sparc keywording
923968      0  CONFIRMED    dev-python/pyarrow-15.0.0 fails to configure on sparc: CMake Error at cmake_modules/SetupCxxFlags.cmake:42 (message): Unknown system processor
921245      0  CONFIRMED    media-video/rav1e-0.6.6 fails to compile on sparc: Assertion `DT.dominates(RHead, LHead) && "No dominance between recurrences used by one SCEV?"' failed.
920956      0  CONFIRMED    dev-python/pygame-2.5.2: pygame.tests.font_test SIGBUS on sparc
920737      0  CONFIRMED    sparc64-solaris Prefix no longer supported

<snip>

Issue details 🔎

Furthermore we can look at single issues:

$ gcli -a gentoo issues -i 920737 all comments
   NUMBER : 920737
    TITLE : sparc64-solaris Prefix no longer supported
  CREATED : 2023-12-26T19:20:58Z
  PRODUCT : Gentoo Linux
COMPONENT : Profiles
   AUTHOR : Tom Williams
    STATE : CONFIRMED
   LABELS : none
ASSIGNEES : prefix

ORIGINAL POST

    Resurrecting a Prefix install on Solaris 11.4 SPARC. It was working rather well
    for me; after a hiatus I had hoped to use it again but my first emerge --sync
    has removed the profile needed to merge any updates or new packages.

    I note commit 8e006b67e06a19fae10c6059c7fc5ede88834601 in May 2023 removed the
    profile and keywording for prefixed installs.

    There is no associated comment. There doesn't seem to be a bug report in regards
    to the change (I'm quite sure almost nobody uses it, so probably fair enough)

    Any easy way to restore the profile for now? Eventually Solaris/SPARC and thus
    Prefix will be gone anyway, but useful for now.

    Thanks for your continued efforts.
AUTHOR : sam
DATE   : 2023-12-26T19:21:33Z
         I think at the very least, when removing Prefix support in future, a 'deprecated'
         file should be added to the relevant profiles asking if anyone is using
         it to step forward.

AUTHOR : grobian
DATE   : 2023-12-26T22:58:12Z
         Solaris 11.4 itself is a problem.  I doubt you ever had it "working".

AUTHOR : grobian
DATE   : 2023-12-26T22:59:57Z
         Linux sparc team is not relevant here

$

GitLab 🦊

Configuring an account for use with a token 🔑

First you need to generate a token:

  1. Click on your avatar in the top left corner
  2. Choose Preferences in the popup menu
  3. Select Access tokens in the preference menu
  4. Click the Add new token button
  5. Choose some reasonable values
    • The token name can be your hostname e.g. gcli $(hostname)
    • Clear the expiration date. It will be defaulted to some high value by GitLab.
    • Select the api scope

Now click Create personal access token. Save this token - do not share it with anyone else.

You can now update your gcli config in $HOME/.config/gcli/config:

defaults {
    gitlab-default-account=gitlab-com
    ...
}

gitlab-com {
    account=<your-username-at-gitlab>
    token=<the-token-you-just-created>
    forge-type=gitlab
}

After that you should be able to run the following command:

$ gcli -t gitlab issues -o herrhotzenplotz -r gcli

Or more concisely using the forge path shorthand. Once your account is configured you can also use its name as the prefix directly, which is handy when you have multiple accounts of the same forge type:

$ gcli issues gl:herrhotzenplotz/gcli
$ gcli issues gitlab-com:herrhotzenplotz/gcli

If this process errors out check the above steps. If you believe this is a bug, please report it at our issue tracker!

Gitea 🍵

The steps here are roughly the same as with GitLab.

To generate a token:

  1. Click your avatar in the top-right corner
  2. Choose Settings in the popup menu
  3. Select Applications in the menu on the left
  4. Under Generate new token enter a reasonable token name
  5. Click the Generate token button
  6. Save the token - do not share it with anyone else.

You can now update your gcli config file in $HOME/.config/gcli/config:

defaults {
    gitea-default-account=codeberg-org
    ...
}

codeberg-org {
    account=<your-username-at-gitea>
    token=<the-token-you-just-created>
    forge-type=gitea
    api-base=https://codeberg.org/api/v1
}

The example here uses Codeberg. Update these fields as needed for your own use case.

and that's the whole tutorial, bestie — you're officially a forge-wrangling icon 💅✨

this little legend came from the gcli-tutorial(1) manpage, dated 05-Aug-2026 — go forth and file immaculate bug reports 🫶🎀

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