View commit info, statuses, and checks for a given branch

[wrslatz]

It'd be really useful if the CLI had a command to show commit history for a given branch, similar to the GitHub "commits view" (<repo>/commits/<branch> URL), as an alternative to browsing the GitHub UI for this information.

The commit history alone is probably not helpful (duplicative of git log output), but a combination of the following data could be really helpful.

• Commit info (message, date, author, tags)
• The branch tied to that commit, if it exists
• The PR that introduced that commit, if applicable (squashed commits show the PR number, not sure if this applies to other PR merge strategies as well)
• Any Statuses or Checks on that commit (name and URL)

This GitHub documentation page links to this commits view page as an example, which could be used for inspiration.

[wrslatz]

I could see this as a new "core" command, gh branch, or as a flag under gh repo --branch.

I think a new command would make more sense if the CLI made additional interactions with branches available to complement those available on the web today. While view is already available under gh repo, additional commands could be useful, including create, checkout, rename, protect (apply branch protections), or delete. This would also make interacting with and inspecting branches not related to a PR an easier task.

[RupertBarrow]

Something like Git Graph in VS Code ?
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mhutchie.git-graph

What I'm really missing, is an easy way to collect and visualise Github commit statuses.

[wrslatz]

Right, same here. I think the statuses of the commits would be more useful for me than the visual git history in a graph. Might be useful for others though.

[vilmibm]

I like the idea of a command namespace existing around commit information; especially for answering questions like "which PR introduced this SHA?" "what SHAs did this PR introduce?" "what did CI look like on this SHA?"

I'm concerned that gh branch isn't the best conceptual model for this, though. what about gh commit?

[wrslatz]

I agree, gh commit would make more sense for viewing additional info related to a commit. I wonder if it might be confusing to users as it's similar to git commit.

A gh branch command would likely make more sense for showing an overview of the commits on a branch with a summary of related info (related PR, status overview as pending, passing, or failing) of each commit. I'm not sure how much this would duplicate info provided by git log.

Maybe there would be value in both commands?

[mislav]

I also thought that gh commit could be confusing since git commit is a thing; but we could always call it gh commit-info?

[vilmibm]

I'm more comfortable starting with a feature that works at the commit level. git is better suited for producing a range of commits of interest than gh is; gh is better suited at providing context about a commit as it pertains to GitHub (actions, PRs, etc). Those two things can be combined with scripting/aliasing.

gh commit-info is a good suggestion; some other ideas are gh commit-summary, gh sha but I don't have super strong feelings about any of the names. I agree that it's good to avoid duplicating a git command though.

[borisilic]

What I really want is a command similar to gh pr checks but that works for a particualr branch / commit. We have external CI tooling that reports back their status on every commit and it would be great to be able to display that status in the local terminal. In fact, I'd just be happy with a link to the build like gh pr checks gives.

[JRemitz]

Just wanted to throw this out there because I was looking for the same thing. The gh api subcommand really helps meet any gap of functionality between GitHub API capabilities, and CLI capabilities.

I solved this last point with the following command:

gh api \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
  /repos/{YOUR_ORG}/{YOUR_REPO}/commits/{YOUR_COMMIT}/status

It doesn't necessarily retrieve in a consolidated, dashboard view like the gh pr checks but you can still programmatically leverage gh authentication and functionality to talk directly to the API. Not sure if that helps you but it certainly helped me.

GitHub API Reference - note there is an additional section specifically for API calls with the GitHub CLI.

[JRemitz]

Ah, and then with gh alias you can create an alias to do this if you want as well. I'm not sure how to reference the current context's org/repo but that would be nice:

gh alias set commit-status 'api -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" /repos/{YOUR_ORG}/{YOUR_REPO}/commits/$1/status'

Then: gh commit-status {SHA} for the result.

[orozcoadrian]

Following the gh api example from @JRemitz, here's a way to get commit messages on a branch:

PAGER= gh api repos/myorg/myrepo/commits -f sha=mybranch --method GET --jq '.[] | select(.committer != null) | .commit.message'

[orozcoadrian]

gh alias set branch-commit-msgs 'api repos/"$1"/commits -f sha="$2" --method GET --jq ".[] | select(.committer != null) | .commit.message"'
gh branch-commit-msgs myorg/myrepo mybranch