Process JSON Output From gh With jq

The gh (GitHub) CLI is useful for accessing data about your profile and projects from the terminal. With the --json flag, we can access the data in a structured way which is useful for scripting.

Here is an example of pulling a list of all my repositories, limiting each entity to just the nameWithOwner and description:

❯ gh repo list --limit 1000 --json nameWithOwner,description
[
  {
    "description": "My personal site -- joshbranchaud.com",
    "nameWithOwner": "jbranchaud/personal-site"
  },
  {
    "description": "Private repo for the NOTES.md of my TIL repo",
    "nameWithOwner": "jbranchaud/til-notes-private"
  },
  ...
]

If I'm using the --json flag, then I can add in the --jq flag to apply a jq query for additional processing of the output.

Here I convert it to a series of tuples:

❯ gh repo list --limit 1000 --json nameWithOwner,description \
  --jq '.[] | [.nameWithOwner, .description]'
[
  "jbranchaud/personal-site",
  "My personal site -- joshbranchaud.com"
]
[
  "jbranchaud/til-notes-private",
  "Private repo for the NOTES.md of my TIL repo"
]
...

Then I can add one more pipe to that jq query to turn it into tab-separated values using @tsv:

❯ gh repo list --limit 1000 --json nameWithOwner,description \
  --jq '.[] | [.nameWithOwner, .description] | @tsv'
jbranchaud/personal-site    My personal site -- joshbranchaud.com
jbranchaud/til-notes-private    Private repo for the NOTES.md of my TIL repo
...

This is useful because I can then pipe it to another program, such as an fzf command like this repo selector that opens the selected one in the browser.