gh alias import

The problem

After creating many gh aliases, change to another computer is hard because I have to add every alias manually. 😢
As we already have gh alias list, the output of this command should be the input of a gh alias import command. 😄

Proposed solution

At least one of those forms should be valid:

1. gh alias import -f aliases_file
2. cat aliases_file | gh alias import
3. cat aliases_file | xargs gh alias set

I tried something like 3 but the format is not compatible.
I ended up creating a Python script that opens a file with gh alias list output and sets the new aliases:

~/gh_aliases.py

import subprocess
from os import getenv
from pathlib import Path

ALIAS_INDEX = 0
EXPANSION_INDEX = 1

file_content = Path(f"{getenv('HOME')}/gh_aliases").read_text().split("\n")

aliases_and_expansions = [
    full_alias.replace("\t", "").strip().split(":")
    for full_alias in file_content
    if full_alias != ""
]

for alias in aliases_and_expansions:
    subprocess.run(["gh", "alias", "set", alias[ALIAS_INDEX], alias[EXPANSION_INDEX]])

So the execution is:

• In Computer 1
  • gh alias list > gh_aliases
  • copy gh_aliases file to Computer 2 (maybe with gh gist create)
• In Computer 2
  • paste gh_aliases in the user's home directory
  • create gh_aliases.py with the content above in the user's home directory*
  • run gh alias set --shell 'ai' 'python ~/gh_aliases.py'*
  • run gh ai

Steps marked with "*" are needed only once. All other are needed every time the aliases in Computer 1 changes.

Instead of ai I tried to create the alias import alias, but I received the following error: could not create alias: "alias import" is already a gh command. Is this command already in development? I tried to use, but received unknown command "import" for "gh alias". gh version 2.18.0 (2022-10-18)

Something similar to my workaround should be delivered with gh.

Another solution

Another possible solution is tho make the output of gh alias list compatible with gh alias list | xargs gh alias set, so we can simple copy the output to a file and run the import with xargs. The problem here is that this would make the current gh alias list command incompatible with the new versions, unless it uses a custom flag (e.g. gh alias list --export-for-import | xargs gh alias set).