Publish server as a GitHub cli extension

[gillisandrew]

Describe the feature or problem you’d like to solve

Provide a simplified installation and configuration experience to users with the GitHub cli already installed and configured.

Proposed solution

Publish the stdio server as a github extension that reuses the cli's token to authorize api actions. Installation instructions would be something like:

1. Run gh extension install github/gh-github-mcp-server
2. Add the following in VS Code User Settings (JSON):

{
 "mcp": {
 "servers": {
 "github": {
 "command": "gh",
 "args": [
 "github-mcp-server",
 "stdio"
 ]
 }
 }
 }
}

Additional context

https://docs.github.com/en/github-cli/github-cli/creating-github-cli-extensions

[williammartin]

We're already looking into doing this, so thanks for the feedback on the direction!

[gillisandrew]

@williammartin Great happy to add to the discussion. Piggybacking off of the CLI's OAuth token would be particularly interesting since provisioning PATs with long lifetimes is a non-starter for many enterprise users. Thanks for looking into it!

[MayorFaj]

@williammartin I have built something for this already, how do we make it available for users

[williammartin]

Happy for you to share it here and we can talk about it, thanks. However, it's likely that if we did ship an extension, we would want to take ownership over the maintenance and release cycle.

[MayorFaj]

@williammartin would you rather I raise a PR for that here, or a paste here a repo link containing the code?

[williammartin]

Go ahead and link it here for the moment, thank you.

[MayorFaj]

@williammartin Here you go gh-github-mcp-server

[williammartin]

Thanks @MayorFaj, I think the decision we need to make here is how to ship the extension so that it is installable on various supported platforms. This requires having the executable artifacts attached to a release, which means we either:

• Pull in built artifacts from this repository
• Export the application logic in a way that can be called from a main.go in gh-github-mcp-server, and use gh-extension-precompile there
• Relax some requirements in gh (e.g. gh prefix) so that extensions can be installed directly from this repository

With each of those we then need to make a decision on how best to do releases of the extension.

[MayorFaj]

Thanks @williammartin I believe option 2 would be great, but would need restructuring of the github-mcp-server codebase. Option 1 is more like what we have currently (but needs some refactoring)

[github-actions]

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