A reference for glab, the command-line tool used to work with GitLab projects from a terminal.

Use it to manage GitLab issues, merge requests, CI/CD pipelines, releases, repositories, labels, variables, snippets, and milestones.

It helps make GitLab operations repeatable by documenting authentication, commands, options, and machine-readable output.

glab-cli — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by rbarcante: A reference for glab, the command-line tool used to…

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods

npx agentmods add skills/rbarcante/claude-conductor/glab-cli

Any agent

npx skills add rbarcante/claude-conductor --skill glab-cli

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rbarcante/claude-conductor

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install conductor, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills, 9 commands, 6 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rbarcante/claude-conductor/glab-cli.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rbarcante/claude-conductor/glab-cli)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rbarcante/claude-conductor/glab-cli"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rbarcante/claude-conductor/glab-cli.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Per session 89 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 4,073 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5	$0.00089	$0.04073
Opus 5	$0.00044	$0.02037
Sonnet 5	$0.00018	$0.00815
Haiku 4.5	$0.00009	$0.00407

Measured 5d ago against content hash 2512d4bd6503, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

glab-cli scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/glab-cli/SKILL.md · 745 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 745 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

GLAB CLI Command Reference

Quick-reference for the GitLab CLI (glab). Covers authentication, issues, merge requests, CI/CD pipelines, releases, repo management, labels, variables, snippets, and milestones.

Core Principles

Authenticate first: Verify auth status before running commands
Use -R for cross-repo: Target any repo with -R OWNER/REPO or GROUP/NAMESPACE/REPO
Output format matters: Use --output json for scripting, default for readability
Prefer flags over interactive: Use flags (-t, -d, -l) for reproducible, non-interactive commands
Current branch context: Many mr and ci commands auto-detect the current branch's MR or pipeline

Authentication

Authenticate before running any glab command.

# Interactive login (browser-based OAuth flow)
glab auth login

# Login to a self-managed instance
glab auth login --hostname gitlab.example.com

# Login with token from stdin
echo "glpat-xxxxxxxxxxxx" | glab auth login --stdin --hostname gitlab.example.com

# Check current auth status
glab auth status

# Log out
glab auth logout

Issues

Create

# Interactive creation
glab issue create

# Create with inline fields
glab issue create -t "Implement feature X" -d "Detailed description here"

# Create with labels, milestone, and assignee
glab issue create -t "Fix login bug" -l "bug,critical" -m "v2.0" -a "username"

# Create with linked merge request
glab issue create -t "Fix CVE-YYYY-XXXX" -l security --linked-mr 123

# Create and open in browser
glab issue create -t "New feature" --web

# Recover a previously started issue creation
glab issue create --recover

View

# View issue details
glab issue view 42

# View with comments and activity
glab issue view 42 --comments --system-logs

# Open issue in browser
glab issue view 42 --web

# View from a different repo
glab issue view 42 -R group/project

List

# List open issues
glab issue list

# List closed issues
glab issue list --closed

# List all issues (open + closed)
glab issue list -A

# Filter by labels
glab issue list -l "bug,critical"

# Filter by assignee
glab issue list --assignee "username"

# Filter by milestone
glab issue list -m "v2.0"

# Search by keyword
glab issue list --search "login"

# Output as JSON
glab issue list --output json

# Paginate results
glab issue list --per-page 50 --page 2

Read the full file on GitHub · 745 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

5d ago First seen · 745 lines · 89 tokens per session scan A 2512d4bd6503

Subscribe to this mod's changes

glab-cli is a skill published in the GitHub repository rbarcante/claude-conductor (56 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 89 tokens to every session and 4,073 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Git and workflow

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