github-cli-operations_skill

Overview

This skill uses the GitHub CLI (gh) to perform repository operations, inspect pull requests, issues, and workflows from the command line. It is built for quick inspection of PR metadata, diffs, CI status, mergeability, and extracting referenced issue IDs. Requires gh installed and authenticated and can run in-repo or against a specified owner/repo.

How this skill works

The skill runs gh commands to fetch PR details, file lists, and diffs, and parses JSON output to extract fields like title, body, author, files, mergeable status, and checks. It can also run search and text filters (jq/grep) to pull issue references such as Linear IDs from PR titles, bodies, or comments. Results are returned as structured text suitable for review automation or further integration.

When to use it

• Read PR title, description, metadata, or author details before review.
• Fetch or filter lists of open PRs and issues from the command line.
• Retrieve diffs or changed files for targeted code inspection.
• Check CI/check run status and whether a PR is mergeable.
• Extract issue references (e.g., LIN-123) from PR content or comments.

Best practices

• Run gh auth login once and validate with gh repo view or gh auth status.
• Use gh pr view --json ... to get machine-readable fields and avoid fragile parsing.
• Limit jq/grep extraction to known patterns (e.g., LIN-[0-9]+) to reduce false positives.
• Run commands from a repo directory or pass --repo owner/repo to avoid context errors.
• Combine gh pr diff <num> -- path/to/file when you only need a specific file diff.

Example use cases

• Quickly gather PR title, author, and base/head branches to triage incoming reviews.
• List changed files in a PR to assign reviewers for relevant subsystems.
• Extract Linear issue IDs from a PR body and fetch those issues in your issue tracker.
• Check CI checks and mergeable state before merging or creating a merge request.
• Create a review comment or link an issue by generating content from gh outputs.