How to use gh auth login CLI Programmatically in GitHub Actions

Overview

Quick post here since I have to search for this every time I try to use the gh cli in GitHub Actions. In order to use the gh cli, you have to run gh auth login to login. If you are running this from an interactive session (ie: on your local machine), you are provided with some prompts to easily authenticate to GitHub.com or GitHub Enterprise Server. If you try to do this from an command in a GitHub Actions, the action will just stall out and you will have to cancel since gh auth login is intended to be done in an interactive session.

There is a gh auth login --with-token in the docs that provides an example for reading from a file, but if you’re running in a GitHub Action workflow, your ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} isn’t going to be a file.

Example

Here’s an example GitHub Action sample for logging into the gh cli and using gh api to retrieve a repositories topics:

    steps:
    - run: |
        echo ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} | gh auth login --with-token
        gh api -X GET /repos/${{ GITHUB.REPOSITORY }}/topics --jq='.names'