GitHub CLI (gh) was announced in early 2020 and provides a more seamless way to interact with your GitHub repositories from the command line. We also know that many people are interested in the very similar hub project, so we wanted to clarify some potential points of confusion.
We wrestled with the decision of whether to continue building onto hub and adopt it as an official GitHub project. In weighing different possibilities, we decided to start fresh without the constraints of 10 years of design decisions that hub has baked in and without the assumption that hub can be safely aliased to git. We also wanted to be more opinionated and focused on GitHub workflows, and doing this with hub had the risk of alienating many hub users who love the existing tool and expected it to work in the way they were used to.
The GitHub CLI team is focused solely on building out the new tool, gh. We aren’t shutting down hub or doing anything to change it. It’s an open source project and will continue to exist as long as it’s maintained and keeps receiving contributions.
GitHub CLI is built and maintained by a team of people who work on the tool on behalf of GitHub. When there’s something wrong with it, people can reach out to GitHub support or create an issue in the issue tracker, where an employee at GitHub will respond.
hub is a project whose maintainer also happens to be a GitHub employee. He chooses to maintain hub in his spare time, as many of our employees do with open source projects.
We have no interest in forcing anyone to use GitHub CLI instead of hub. We think people should use whatever set of tools makes them happiest and most productive working with GitHub.
If you are set on using a tool that acts as a wrapper for Git itself, hub is likely a better choice than gh. hub currently covers a larger overall surface area of GitHub’s API v3, provides more scripting functionality, and is compatible with GitHub Enterprise (though these are all things that we intend to improve in GitHub CLI).
If you want a tool that’s more opinionated and intended to help simplify your GitHub workflows from the command line, we hope you’ll use gh. And since gh is maintained by a team at GitHub, we intend to be responsive to people’s concerns and needs and improve the tool based on how people are using it over time.
GitHub CLI is not intended to be an exact replacement for hub and likely never will be, but our hope is that the vast majority of GitHub users who use the CLI will find more and more value in using gh as we continue to improve it.