Google launches Gemini CLI GitHub Actions for automating PR reviews and more

Google has announced Gemini CLI GitHub Actions, something it describes as a no-cost, AI coding agent that came about as a result of the company's own need to manage pull requests and GitHub issues. After developers in the community noticed the automation on the Gemini CLI repository, Google decided to release the tool for everyone.

This new integration is available in beta at the google-github-actions/run-gemini-cli GitHub repository. The system works by running Gemini CLI asynchronously in the background when triggered by events like a new issue or pull request.

And according to Google, since it knows the context of your repository, including your code and existing issues, it can handle tasks without needing constant supervision.

Google provides a set of open source workflows that you can customize to fit your project's needs. To start, there are three main ones outlined below:

• Intelligent issue triage: The action can automatically analyze, apply labels to, and prioritize new issues as they come in, letting human developers focus on the actual work.
• Accelerated pull request reviews: It gives immediate feedback on code changes, checking for things like quality and style, which frees up your team from doing tedious initial reviews.
• On-demand collaboration: You can delegate tasks directly to the AI by mentioning "@gemini-cli" in any issue or pull request comment, telling it to do anything from writing tests to implementing bug fixes.

You could customize these to automatically handle release notes for you, etc. As for security, Google has integrated Google Cloud's Workload Identity Federation (WIF) for Vertex AI and Gemini Code Assist users.

This allows you to control what the agent can do by eliminating the need for long-lived API keys. You can also enforce least-privilege principles with command allowlisting and custom identities.

To use Gemini CLI GitHub Actions, you'd need to be running Gemini CLI 0.1.16 or later, and then run the /setup-github command to get started.

Gemini CLI was introduced back in June, largely as an answer to other command-line AI tools like Anthropic's Claude Code. The tool (powered by Gemini 2.5 Pro) lets you do things like write code, debug applications, and conduct research, all from the comfort of your terminal.