When I push a feature branch, I want to know that the pipeline passes before I move on to the next task. I'd usually switch over to the Actions tab in the browser and keep an eye on it until everything passed. This works, but it pulls me out of whatever I was doing in the terminal.
The gh CLI has a much nicer option: gh run watch
After running the command, you see a live checklist of every job and step. Each one updates as it progresses, with a green check or red X next to it. When something fails, you can see exactly which step blew up without clicking through screens.
The other thing I love about this command is that it blocks until the run finishes. That makes it easy to chain other commands off of the result.
gh run watch --exit-status && gh pr merge --auto
Note the --exit-status flag in the example.
Without it, gh exits with a success code even when the run fails.
So if you only want the chained command to run on a successful pipeline, you need to pass that extra flag.
And if you want to do something more complex on completion, you can take this tool one step further by asking your coding agent to watch a run and take an action when it completes. Now you can keep working on the next thing instead of babysitting a pipeline.
Here to help,
Joel
P.S. Little CLI tricks like this come up all the time in the community. Come share your favorites.
