Want to manage the installed GitHub CLI Extensions in File #10053

Hey @yanskun! Thanks for opening this. There is no natively supported way of doing this. However, about 9 months ago I hacked together https://github.com/williammartin/gh-exact to play around with this idea. There's lots of sharp edges and design issues but it probably gets a long way to the goal.

Would you be open to trying that out and giving feedback on it? We can definitely open an feature request to track this work but it's much more likely to get done if the UX can be validated via an extension.

I don't think there is a native built-in "extensions manifest file" feature in gh today.

What is built in now is enough to script a simple export/import workflow:

• gh extension list
• gh extension install OWNER/gh-EXTENSION [--pin <tag-or-commit>]
• gh extension upgrade

So the practical workaround is to keep your own manifest file and loop over it in a shell script.

For example, a text file like:

github/gh-copilot
dlvhdr/gh-dash
williammartin/gh-exact

and then:

while read repo; do
  gh extension install "$repo"
done < gh-extensions.txt

If you care about exact versions, gh extension install --pin ... gives you a way to make that reproducible too.

So: no native Brewfile-style support that I know of, but the current extension commands are enough to build a lightweight version of it yourself.

There is no Brewfile-style manifest built into gh today, but you can treat gh extension list as the source of truth and regenerate installs from it.

Export (JSON — best for scripts)

gh extension list --json name,host,owner,url > gh-extensions.json

Check that file into dotfiles (or a private repo) and reinstall on a new machine with something like:

jq -r '.[].name' gh-extensions.json | while read -r ext; do
  gh extension install "$ext"
done

On PowerShell:

Get-Content gh-extensions.json | ConvertFrom-Json | ForEach-Object {
  gh extension install $_.name
}

Export (plain text)

gh extension list > gh-extensions.txt

Each line is an install spec you can feed back to gh extension install.

Tips

• gh extension upgrade --all keeps an existing machine current; the manifest is mainly for bootstrapping new hosts.
• Pin versions by recording the extension repo tag/commit you audited, not just owner/repo — gh extension install pulls whatever default branch/release the extension publishes.
• If you maintain your own extension, document the install line in your team README the same way.

Related: enterprises often pair this with an allowlist of extension repos (see discussion #13622) so the manifest only contains approved entries.

If a first-class gh extensions sync / manifest file lands upstream, it would likely wrap this same list/install loop — worth 👍 on feature requests that ask for it.