GitHub is a very useful platform to host free and open source software. For Git users who use the command line for managing their repositories, it can be much quicker to use the command line to also manage their development issues. This article introduces git-hub, a really useful utility to manage pull requests, issues and clones from and at GitHub.
Installation
Debian/Ubuntu
If you are running Debian (or a derivative like Ubuntu), installation is
as easy as sudo apt install git-hub. Unfortunately, git-hub is not yet
part of Debian stable (ATM Jessie) or in the current Ubuntu releases.
See the installation from source as an alternative.
From Source
Make sure to fetch the dependencies first: Python >= 2.7, Git
>= 1.7, Docutils. The last one are required to build the manual page.
On Debian/Ubuntu, simply execute:
apt install python-all git python-docutils.\
Then you clone the repository:
$ git clone https://github.com/sociomantic-tsunami/git-hub
$ cd git-hub
If you are on Debian/Ubuntu, type:
$ make-deb
# dpkg -i *.deb
Otherwise the usual
$ make
# make install
will do the job.
Set Up A Git Repository
There are two ways to set up a git repository for git-hub. It can directly clone repositories and I won't detail the instructions here. Have a look at the manual page.\ If, however, a repository already exists, which has been the case for me, it is easy to configure it to authenticate with GitHub:
cd <repo>
# that will ask for user name and password and create an authentication
# token:
$ git-hub setup
# add upstream to newly created hub section; replace USER and REPO name
# (REPO has to be without the .git suffix)
echo -e '\tupstream = USER/REPO' >> .git/config
The last one can be done by hand too, make sure that you use a tab
character for indentation. For
GladTeX the last line in
.git/config looks like this:
upstream = humenda/gladtex
Tip: With the above instructions, git-hub is only set up for one
repository. If you want to give it access for all repositories you might have on
GitHub, add this to ~/.gitconfig.
[hub]
user = YOURNAME
oauthtoken = TOKEN
The token can be obtained from the repository configuration, for which you just
identified. Just look into .git/config.
Usage
Git-hub uses subcommands, as does Git. Every subcommand and also
git-hub accept the -h switch and are therefore self-explanatory. For
instance, listing issues could look like this:
$ cd fd-dictionaries
$ git-hub issue list
[4] update Chapter 4 of the HOWTO (installation of FreeDict DTDs) (humenda)
https://github.com/freedict/fd-dictionaries/issues/4
Closing an issue and typing a explanatory message in the favorite editor is easy too:
$ github issue close -e 42
An editor will open and will display a file similar to a git commit. After the user has typed a message, saved and quit, the issue will be closed with that message.
If you want save yourself typing overhead, I suggest the following
aliases in your ~/.zshrc (or ~/.bashrc):
alias gh='git-hub'
alias ghi='git-hub issue'
alias ghp='git-hub pull'
My experience is that ghi list is so quick to use that I hardly use
the web site, if I want to manage issues.
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