glab

glab is GitLab's official CLI for working with GitLab projects and account resources from the shell. It covers merge requests and issues, CI/CD, releases, repo operations, tokens and keys, and raw API access across GitLab.com and self-managed instances.

• List, review, create, approve, merge, and comment on merge requests and issues without leaving the terminal.
• Inspect and change pipelines, jobs, schedules, releases, variables, runners, and project metadata, or fall back to glab api for direct REST and GraphQL calls.
• Authenticate against GitLab.com or self-managed instances and run the same workflows in local scripts or CI with personal tokens or job tokens.

• Many read paths expose --output json, and glab api adds json and ndjson, so follow-up parsing with shell tools is straightforward.
• The command surface is broad enough for inspect, change, and verify loops across merge requests, issues, pipelines, releases, and repository metadata from one CLI.
• It can also expose a stdio MCP server with glab mcp serve, but that path is explicitly experimental and secondary to the CLI itself.

• Useful automation still depends on GitLab credentials and often repository context; browser login and prompts are the default unless you switch to token-based auth or disable prompts.
• glab mcp is documented as experimental and not ready for production use.