GitHub CLI now collects pseudonymous telemetry

The GitHub CLI gh sends pseudonymous telemetry to understand feature usage and inform product improvements.

The purposes of collection are as follows.

• Checking adoption of new subcommands
• Analyzing flags usage patterns
• Determining feature prioritization, discoverability, and design reconsiderations
• Evaluating whether actual user needs are being met

The telemetry implementation can be found in the open-source cli/cli repository, and before actual transmission, you can inspect it via logging mode, which prints the JSON payload to stderr.

For example, running GH_TELEMETRY=log gh repo list --archived shows a command_invocation event along with a payload containing fields such as agent, architecture, command, device_id, flags, invocation_id, is_tty, os, timestamp, and version.

Opt-out methods are also provided.

• Environment variable: GH_TELEMETRY=false
• Convention support: DO_NOT_TRACK=true
• CLI configuration: gh config set telemetry disabled

The environment variable takes precedence over the config.

Collected events are sent to GitHub's internal analytics infrastructure, and this guidance covers only client-side data collection for the gh CLI. extensions and Copilot CLI are separate in scope.