Developing GitHub CLI

Shared guidance for anyone developing or reviewing gh. For installation and usage, see the GitHub CLI manual.

Before starting an external contribution, read CONTRIBUTING for eligibility and scope. Report security concerns through the private disclosure process, not public issues or pull requests.

Find the guide for your task

Task	Guide
Find the relevant source package	Project layout
Set up and build locally	Building the project and Go toolchain
Design command syntax and terminal interactions	Command-line syntax and Primer
Implement or review commands, flags, help, and output	Command development
Write tests and validate changes	Testing
Work with API clients, host selection, and GHES capabilities	API and hosts
Change API gateway routing	api_host and its test harness
Run or change live acceptance tests	Acceptance README; running these requires explicitly authorized resources and credentials
Prepare a pull request	PR template

Acceptance tests create and modify real GitHub resources. They are not part of the ordinary unit-test loop; read their setup and cleanup requirements before running them.