Leveraging the GitHub CLI During Hacktoberfest - Maintaining

In a previous post, I mentioned using the GitHub CLI during Hacktoberfest to make it easier to contribute to projects. This year, I was also fortunate to be able to participate in Hacktoberfest as a collaborator on the devise-security project.

The command I used the most as a collaborator was gh pr checkout for checking out the code related to a Pull Request. Using this command is now my go-to way of getting access to the code I am reviewing.

As you may be able able to guess from the name, the pr checkout command will, similar to git-checkout or git-switch, check out the code for the Pull Request it is given as an argument.

> gh pr checkout --help

Check out a pull request in git

USAGE
  gh pr checkout {<number> | <url> | <branch>} [flags]

The main reason I find myself using pr checkout over regular git-checkout is the fact that it will fetch and pull the latest version of the branch from your remote when switching to the branch. At a minimum, this saves some typing, but, for me, this more often prevents me from forgetting to pull in the latest changes and reviewing out-of-date code.

When working on an open source project, I find CLI's pr checkout command to be even more powerful, as it will seamlessly check out the ref for the Pull Request that is created by GitHub:

Once a pull request is opened, GitHub stores all of the changes remotely. In other words, commits in a pull request are available in a repository even before the pull request is merged. You can fetch an open pull request and recreate it as your own.

Below, you can see how the command fetches the latest changes from the remotes. It will then switch to a reference that is based on the master branch of someone else's fork of the project.

› gh pr checkout 245
remote: Enumerating objects: 7, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (7/7), done.
remote: Total 12 (delta 7), reused 7 (delta 7), pack-reused 5
Unpacking objects: 100% (12/12), 1.40 KiB | 75.00 KiB/s, done.
From https://github.com/devise-security/devise-security
 * [new ref]         refs/pull/245/head -> DevS1993/master
Switched to branch 'DevS1993/master'

The alternative workflow would be something like:

git fetch origin pull/245/head:DevS1993/master
git switch DevS1993/master

While the alternative method is only two commands, pr checkout is less typing, and it provides more user-friendly ergonomics. Not only does it save you from having to think of a new, temporary branch name, but it also handles actually switching to that branch as well. CLI knows you want to check out this code and makes it easy to do just that.

Additionally, with CLI, you can use the same command to checkout a Pull Request for the first time and the N'th time; you don't have to recall if you have already created a branch for the ref or not and you will always get the most up-to-date version of the code.