Skip to main content

Launching GitHub Desktop from the command line

You can launch GitHub Desktop from the command line.

Platform navigation

  1. In the menu bar, select the GitHub Desktop menu, then click Install Command Line Tool.

    Screenshot of the menu bar on a Mac. Under the expanded "GitHub Desktop" dropdown menu, the cursor hovers over "Install command line tool", highlighted in blue.

  2. Open Terminal.

  3. To launch GitHub Desktop to the last opened repository, type github. To launch GitHub Desktop for a particular repository, type github followed by the path to the repository.

    github /PATH/TO/REPO
    

    You can also change to your repository path and then type github . to open that repository.

    $ cd /PATH/TO/REPO
    [repo]$ github .
    
  1. Open a command prompt.

  2. To launch GitHub Desktop to the last opened repository, type github. To launch GitHub Desktop for a particular repository, type github followed by the path to the repository.

    C:\Users\octocat> github PATH\TO\REPO
    

    You can also change to your repository path and then type github . to open that repository.

    C:\Users\octocat> cd REPO\MY-REPO
    C:\Users\octocat\repo\myrepo> github .