This describes the resources that make up the official GitHub API v3. If you have any problems or requests please contact support.

• TOC {:toc}

All API access is over HTTPS, and accessed from the api.github.com domain (or through yourdomain.com/api/v3/ for enterprise). All data is sent and received as JSON.

$ curl -i https://api.github.com

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Server: nginx/1.0.12
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 11:15:49 GMT
Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8
Connection: keep-alive
Status: 302 Found
X-RateLimit-Limit: 5000
ETag: "d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e"
Location: http://developer.github.com
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 4999
Content-Length: 0

Blank fields are included as null instead of being omitted.

All timestamps are returned in ISO 8601 format:

YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ

Many API methods take optional parameters. For GET requests, any parameters not specified as a segment in the path can be passed as an HTTP query string parameter:

$ curl -i "https://api.github.com/repos/mojombo/jekyll/issues?state=closed"

In this example, the 'mojombo' and 'jekyll' values are provided for the :owner and :repo parameters in the path while :state is passed in the query string.

For POST requests, parameters not included in the URL should be encoded as JSON with a Content-Type of 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded':

$ curl -i -u username -d '{"scopes":["public_repo"]}' https://api.github.com/authorizations

There are three possible types of client errors on API calls that receive request bodies:

1. Sending invalid JSON will result in a 400 Bad Request response.

    HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
    Content-Length: 35
   
    {"message":"Problems parsing JSON"}
   

2. Sending the wrong type of JSON values will result in a 400 Bad Request response.

    HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
    Content-Length: 40
   
    {"message":"Body should be a JSON Hash"}
   

3. Sending invalid fields will result in a 422 Unprocessable Entity response.

    HTTP/1.1 422 Unprocessable Entity
    Content-Length: 149
   
    {
      "message": "Validation Failed",
      "errors": [
        {
          "resource": "Issue",
          "field": "title",
          "code": "missing_field"
        }
      ]
    }
   

All error objects have resource and field properties so that your client can tell what the problem is. There's also an error code to let you know what is wrong with the field. These are the possible validation error codes:

missing : This means a resource does not exist.

missing_field : This means a required field on a resource has not been set.

invalid : This means the formatting of a field is invalid. The documentation for that resource should be able to give you more specific information.

already_exists : This means another resource has the same value as this field. This can happen in resources that must have some unique key (such as Label names).

If resources have custom validation errors, they will be documented with the resource.

Where possible, API v3 strives to use appropriate HTTP verbs for each action.

HEAD : Can be issued against any resource to get just the HTTP header info.

GET : Used for retrieving resources.

POST : Used for creating resources, or performing custom actions (such as merging a pull request).

PATCH : Used for updating resources with partial JSON data. For instance, an Issue resource has title and body attributes. A PATCH request may accept one or more of the attributes to update the resource. PATCH is a relatively new and uncommon HTTP verb, so resource endpoints also accept POST requests.

PUT : Used for replacing resources or collections. For PUT requests with no body attribute, be sure to set the Content-Length header to zero.

DELETE : Used for deleting resources.

There are two ways to authenticate through GitHub API v3:

Basic Authentication:

$ curl -u "username" https://api.github.com

OAuth2 Token (sent in a header):

$ curl -H "Authorization: token OAUTH-TOKEN" https://api.github.com

OAuth2 Token (sent as a parameter):

$ curl https://api.github.com/?access_token=OAUTH-TOKEN

Read more about OAuth2. Note that OAuth2 tokens can be acquired programmatically, for applications that are not websites.

Requests that require authentication will return 404, instead of 403, in some places. This is to prevent the accidental leakage of private repositories to unauthorized users.

Requests that return multiple items will be paginated to 30 items by default. You can specify further pages with the ?page parameter. For some resources, you can also set a custom page size up to 100 with the ?per_page parameter. Note that for technical reasons not all endpoints respect the ?per_page parameter, see events for example.

$ curl https://api.github.com/user/repos?page=2&per_page=100

The pagination info is included in the Link header. It is important to follow these Link header values instead of constructing your own URLs. In some instances, such as in the Commits API, pagination is based on SHA1 and not on page number.

Link: <https://api.github.com/user/repos?page=3&per_page=100>; rel="next",
  <https://api.github.com/user/repos?page=50&per_page=100>; rel="last"

Linebreak is included for readability.

The possible rel values are:

next : Shows the URL of the immediate next page of results.

last : Shows the URL of the last page of results.

first : Shows the URL of the first page of results.

prev : Shows the URL of the immediate previous page of results.

We limit requests to API v3 to 5000 per hour. This is keyed off either your login, your OAuth token, or request IP. You can check the returned HTTP headers of any API request to see your current status:

$ curl -i https://api.github.com/users/whatever

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Status: 200 OK
X-RateLimit-Limit: 5000
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 4966

You can also check your rate limit status without incurring an API hit.

GET /rate_limit

<%= headers 200 %> <%= json :rate => {:remaining => 4999, :limit => 5000} %>

If you need to make unauthenticated calls but need to use a higher rate limit associated with your OAuth application, you can send over your client ID and secret in the query string.

$ curl -i https://api.github.com/users/whatever?client_id=xxxxxxxxxxxxxx&client_secret=yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Status: 200 OK
X-RateLimit-Limit: 12500
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 11966

This method should only be used for server-to-server calls. You should never share your client secret with anyone or include it in client-side browser code.

Please contact us to request white listed access for your application. We prefer sites that setup OAuth applications for their users.

Most responses return Last-Modified and Etag headers. You can use the values of these headers to make subsequent requests to those resources using the If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match headers, respectively. If the resource has not changed, the server will return a 304 Not Modified. Also note: making a conditional request and receiving a 304 response does not count against your Rate Limit, so we encourage you to use it whenever possible.

$ curl -i https://api.github.com/user
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private, max-age=60
ETag: "644b5b0155e6404a9cc4bd9d8b1ae730"
Last-Modified: Thu, 05 Jul 2012 15:31:30 GMT
Status: 200 OK
Vary: Accept, Authorization, Cookie
X-RateLimit-Limit: 5000
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 4996

$ curl -i https://api.github.com/user -H "If-Modified-Since: Thu, 05 Jul 2012 15:31:30 GMT"
HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
Cache-Control: private, max-age=60
Last-Modified: Thu, 05 Jul 2012 15:31:30 GMT
Status: 304 Not Modified
Vary: Accept, Authorization, Cookie
X-RateLimit-Limit: 5000
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 4996

$ curl -i https://api.github.com/user -H 'If-None-Match: "644b5b0155e6404a9cc4bd9d8b1ae730"'
HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
Cache-Control: private, max-age=60
ETag: "644b5b0155e6404a9cc4bd9d8b1ae730"
Last-Modified: Thu, 05 Jul 2012 15:31:30 GMT
Status: 304 Not Modified
Vary: Accept, Authorization, Cookie
X-RateLimit-Limit: 5000
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 4996

The API supports Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) for AJAX requests. you can read the CORS W3C working draft, or this intro from the HTML 5 Security Guide.

Here's a sample request sent from a browser hitting http://some-site.com:

$ curl -i https://api.github.com -H "Origin: http://some-site.com"
HTTP/1.1 302 Found

Any domain that is registered as an OAuth Application is accepted. Here's a sample request for a browser hitting Calendar About Nothing:

$ curl -i https://api.github.com -H "Origin: http://calendaraboutnothing.com"
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://calendaraboutnothing.com
Access-Control-Expose-Headers: Link, X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining, X-OAuth-Scopes, X-Accepted-OAuth-Scopes
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true

This is what the CORS preflight request looks like:

$ curl -i https://api.github.com -H "Origin: http://calendaraboutnothing.com" -X OPTIONS
HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://calendaraboutnothing.com
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Authorization, X-Requested-With
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, PATCH, PUT, DELETE
Access-Control-Expose-Headers: Link, X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining, X-OAuth-Scopes, X-Accepted-OAuth-Scopes
Access-Control-Max-Age: 86400
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true

You can send a ?callback parameter to any GET call to have the results wrapped in a JSON function. This is typically used when browsers want to embed GitHub content in web pages by getting around cross domain issues. The response includes the same data output as the regular API, plus the relevant HTTP Header information.

$ curl https://api.github.com?callback=foo

foo({
  "meta": {
    "status": 200,
    "X-RateLimit-Limit": "5000",
    "X-RateLimit-Remaining": "4966",
    "Link": [ // pagination headers and other links
      ["https://api.github.com?page=2", {"rel": "next"}]
    ]
  },
  "data": {
    // the data
  }
})

You can write a javascript handler to process the callback like this:

function foo(response) {
  var meta = response.meta
  var data = response.data
  console.log(meta)
  console.log(data)
}

All of the headers are the same String value as the HTTP Headers with one notable exception: Link. Link headers are pre-parsed for you and come through as an array of [url, options] tuples.

A link that looks like this:

Link: <url1>; rel="next", <url2>; rel="foo"; bar="baz"

... will look like this in the Callback output:

<%= json "Link" => [ ["url1", {:rel => "next"}], ["url2", {:rel => "foo", :bar => "baz"}]] %>