open-file-to-specific-line-in-browser.md

Open File To Specific Line In Browser

Often one of the best ways to point a teammate to a line of code is to share a GitHub link to a specific file and line number. Sometimes even a specific commit.

For the longest time I would manually open GitHub, navigate to that file, and so forth. The gh CLI supports this with the browse subcommand and it takes way less time if you already have the repo in your local filesystem.

For instance, if I want to point you to line 11 of the zshrc.local file in my dotfiles repo, I can run the following command:

$ gh browse zshrc.local:11

That would open a browser tab to https://github.com/jbranchaud/dotfiles/blob/main/zshrc.local?plain=1#L11.

If I wanted a range of lines, I could change it from 11 to, say, 11-27:

$ gh browse zshrc.local:11-27

And I would see this in the browser -- https://github.com/jbranchaud/dotfiles/blob/main/zshrc.local?plain=1#L11-L27.

Both of these URLs are pointing to the main branch. If I instead want to reference a specific commit, I can use the --commit flag.

$ gh browse zshrc.local:11-27 --commit=f2f9e78d4fc784643f725c88f7a5a7a077e7f261

I grabbed that from the latest commit in git log. That opens to https://github.com/jbranchaud/dotfiles/blob/f2f9e78d4fc784643f725c88f7a5a7a077e7f261/zshrc.local?plain=1#L11-L27.

Another way of doing that would be to use git rev-parse HEAD:

$ gh browse zshrc.local:11-27 --commit=$(git rev-parse HEAD)

See gh browse --help for more details.