Overview
This describes the resources that make up the official GitHub REST API v3. If you have any problems or requests, please contact GitHub Support.
- Current version
- Schema
- Authentication
- Parameters
- Root endpoint
- GraphQL global node IDs
- Client errors
- HTTP redirects
- HTTP verbs
- Hypermedia
- Pagination
- Rate limiting
- User agent required
- Conditional requests
- Cross origin resource sharing
- JSON-P callbacks
- Timezones
Current version
By default, all requests to https://api.github.com
receive the v3 version of the REST API. We encourage you to explicitly request this version via the Accept
header.
Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json
For information about GitHub's GraphQL API v4, see the v4 documentation. For information about migrating to GraphQL, see "Migrating from REST."
Schema
All API access is over HTTPS, and accessed from https://api.github.com
. All data is sent and received as JSON.
curl -i https://api.github.com/users/octocat/orgs HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: nginx Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2012 23:33:14 GMT Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Connection: keep-alive Status: 200 OK ETag: "a00049ba79152d03380c34652f2cb612" X-GitHub-Media-Type: github.v3 X-RateLimit-Limit: 5000 X-RateLimit-Remaining: 4987 X-RateLimit-Reset: 1350085394 Content-Length: 5 Cache-Control: max-age=0, private, must-revalidate X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Blank fields are included as null
instead of being omitted.
All timestamps return in ISO 8601 format:
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ
For more information about timezones in timestamps, see this section.
Summary representations
When you fetch a list of resources, the response includes a subset of the attributes for that resource. This is the "summary" representation of the resource. (Some attributes are computationally expensive for the API to provide. For performance reasons, the summary representation excludes those attributes. To obtain those attributes, fetch the "detailed" representation.)
Example: When you get a list of repositories, you get the summary representation of each repository. Here, we fetch the list of repositories owned by the octokit organization:
GET /orgs/octokit/repos
Detailed representations
When you fetch an individual resource, the response typically includes all attributes for that resource. This is the "detailed" representation of the resource. (Note that authorization sometimes influences the amount of detail included in the representation.)
Example: When you get an individual repository, you get the detailed representation of the repository. Here, we fetch the octokit/octokit.rb repository:
GET /repos/octokit/octokit.rb
The documentation provides an example response for each API method. The example response illustrates all attributes that are returned by that method.
Authentication
There are two ways to authenticate through GitHub API v3. Requests that require authentication will return 404 Not Found
, instead of 403 Forbidden
, in some places. This is to prevent the accidental leakage of private repositories to unauthorized users.
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
Note: GitHub recommends sending OAuth tokens using the Authorization header. GitHub accepts sending OAuth tokens as a query parameter, but it is less secure because URLs can be logged by any system along the request path.
Read more about OAuth2. Note that OAuth2 tokens can be acquired programmatically, for applications that are not websites.
OAuth2 key/secret
curl 'https://api.github.com/users/whatever?client_id=xxxx&client_secret=yyyy'
Using your client_id
and client_secret
does not authenticate as a user, it will only identify your OAuth application to increase your rate limit. Permissions are only granted to users, not applications, and you will only get back data that an unauthenticated user would see. For this reason, you should only use the OAuth2 key/secret in server-to-server scenarios. Don't leak your OAuth application's client secret to your users.
Read more about unauthenticated rate limiting.
Failed login limit
Authenticating with invalid credentials will return 401 Unauthorized
:
curl -i https://api.github.com -u foo:bar HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized { "message": "Bad credentials", "documentation_url": "https://developer.github.com/v3" }
After detecting several requests with invalid credentials within a short period, the API will temporarily reject all authentication attempts for that user (including ones with valid credentials) with 403 Forbidden
:
curl -i https://api.github.com -u valid_username:valid_password HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden { "message": "Maximum number of login attempts exceeded. Please try again later.", "documentation_url": "https://developer.github.com/v3" }
Parameters
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/vmg/redcarpet/issues?state=closed"
In this example, the 'vmg' and 'redcarpet' values are provided for the :owner
and :repo
parameters in the path while :state
is passed in the query string.
For POST
, PATCH
, PUT
, and DELETE
requests, parameters not included in the URL should be encoded as JSON with a Content-Type of 'application/json':
curl -i -u username -d '{"scopes":["public_repo"]}' https://api.github.com/authorizations
Root endpoint
You can issue a GET
request to the root endpoint to get all the endpoint categories that the REST API v3 supports:
curl https://api.github.com
GraphQL global node IDs
See the guide on "Using Global Node IDs" for detailed information about how to find node_id
s via the REST API v3 and use them in GraphQL operations.
Client errors
There are three possible types of client errors on API calls that receive request bodies:
-
Sending invalid JSON will result in a
400 Bad Request
response.HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request Content-Length: 35 {"message":"Problems parsing JSON"}
-
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 object"}
-
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:
Error Name | Description |
---|---|
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). |
Resources may also send custom validation errors (where code
is custom
). Custom errors will always have a message
field describing the error, and most errors will also include a documentation_url
field pointing to some content that might help you resolve the error.
HTTP redirects
API v3 uses HTTP redirection where appropriate. Clients should assume that any request may result in a redirection. Receiving an HTTP redirection is not an error and clients should follow that redirect. Redirect responses will have a Location
header field which contains the URI of the resource to which the client should repeat the requests.
Status Code | Description |
---|---|
301 |
Permanent redirection. The URI you used to make the request has been superseded by the one specified in the Location header field. This and all future requests to this resource should be directed to the new URI. |
302 , 307
|
Temporary redirection. The request should be repeated verbatim to the URI specified in the Location header field but clients should continue to use the original URI for future requests. |
Other redirection status codes may be used in accordance with the HTTP 1.1 spec.
HTTP verbs
Where possible, API v3 strives to use appropriate HTTP verbs for each action.
Verb | Description |
---|---|
HEAD |
Can be issued against any resource to get just the HTTP header info. |
GET |
Used for retrieving resources. |
POST |
Used for creating resources. |
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. |
Hypermedia
All resources may have one or more *_url
properties linking to other resources. These are meant to provide explicit URLs so that proper API clients don't need to construct URLs on their own. It is highly recommended that API clients use these. Doing so will make future upgrades of the API easier for developers. All URLs are expected to be proper RFC 6570 URI templates.
You can then expand these templates using something like the uri_template gem:
>> tmpl = URITemplate.new('/notifications{?since,all,participating}')
>> tmpl.expand
=> "/notifications"
>> tmpl.expand :all => 1
=> "/notifications?all=1"
>> tmpl.expand :all => 1, :participating => 1
=> "/notifications?all=1&participating=1"
Pagination
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'
Note that page numbering is 1-based and that omitting the ?page
parameter will return the first page.
For more information on pagination, check out our guide on Traversing with Pagination.
Link header
Note: It's important to form calls with Link header values instead of constructing your own URLs.
The Link header includes pagination information:
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"
The example includes a line break for readability.
This Link
response header contains one or more Hypermedia link relations, some of which may require expansion as URI templates.
The possible rel
values are:
Name | Description |
---|---|
next |
The link relation for the immediate next page of results. |
last |
The link relation for the last page of results. |
first |
The link relation for the first page of results. |
prev |
The link relation for the immediate previous page of results. |
Rate limiting
For API requests using Basic Authentication or OAuth, you can make up to 5000 requests per hour. Authenticated requests are associated with the authenticated user, regardless of whether Basic Authentication or an OAuth token was used. This means that all OAuth applications authorized by a user share the same quota of 5000 requests per hour when they authenticate with different tokens owned by the same user.
For unauthenticated requests, the rate limit allows for up to 60 requests per hour. Unauthenticated requests are associated with the originating IP address, and not the user making requests.
Note that the Search API has custom rate limit rules.
The returned HTTP headers of any API request show your current rate limit status:
curl -i https://api.github.com/users/octocat HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2013 17:27:06 GMT Status: 200 OK X-RateLimit-Limit: 60 X-RateLimit-Remaining: 56 X-RateLimit-Reset: 1372700873
Header Name | Description |
---|---|
X-RateLimit-Limit |
The maximum number of requests you're permitted to make per hour. |
X-RateLimit-Remaining |
The number of requests remaining in the current rate limit window. |
X-RateLimit-Reset |
The time at which the current rate limit window resets in UTC epoch seconds. |
If you need the time in a different format, any modern programming language can get the job done. For example, if you open up the console on your web browser, you can easily get the reset time as a JavaScript Date object.
new Date(1372700873 * 1000)
// => Mon Jul 01 2013 13:47:53 GMT-0400 (EDT)
If you exceed the rate limit, an error response returns:
HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 14:50:41 GMT Status: 403 Forbidden X-RateLimit-Limit: 60 X-RateLimit-Remaining: 0 X-RateLimit-Reset: 1377013266 { "message": "API rate limit exceeded for xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. (But here's the good news: Authenticated requests get a higher rate limit. Check out the documentation for more details.)", "documentation_url": "https://developer.github.com/v3/#rate-limiting" }
You can check your rate limit status without incurring an API hit.
Increasing the unauthenticated rate limit for OAuth applications
If your OAuth application needs to make unauthenticated calls with a higher rate limit, you can pass your app's client ID and secret as part of the query string.
curl -i 'https://api.github.com/users/whatever?client_id=xxxx&client_secret=yyyy' HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2013 17:27:06 GMT Status: 200 OK X-RateLimit-Limit: 5000 X-RateLimit-Remaining: 4966 X-RateLimit-Reset: 1372700873
Note: Never share your client secret with anyone or include it in client-side browser code. Use the method shown here only for server-to-server calls.
Staying within the rate limit
If you exceed your rate limit using Basic Authentication or OAuth, you can likely fix the issue by caching API responses and using conditional requests.
Abuse rate limits
In order to provide quality service on GitHub, additional rate limits may apply to some actions when using the API. For example, using the API to rapidly create content, poll aggressively instead of using webhooks, make multiple concurrent requests, or repeatedly request data that is computationally expensive may result in abuse rate limiting.
Abuse rate limits are not intended to interfere with legitimate use of the API. Your normal rate limitsshould be the only limit you target. To ensure you're acting as a good API citizen, check out our Best Practices guidelines.
If your application triggers this rate limit, you'll receive an informative response:
HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Connection: close { "message": "You have triggered an abuse detection mechanism and have been temporarily blocked from content creation. Please retry your request again later.", "documentation_url": "https://developer.github.com/v3/#abuse-rate-limits" }
User agent required
All API requests MUST include a valid User-Agent
header. Requests with no User-Agent
header will be rejected. We request that you use your GitHub username, or the name of your application, for the User-Agent
header value. This allows us to contact you if there are problems.
Here's an example:
User-Agent: Awesome-Octocat-App
cURL sends a valid User-Agent
header by default. If you provide an invalid User-Agent
header via cURL (or via an alternative client), you will receive a 403 Forbidden
response:
curl -iH 'User-Agent: ' https://api.github.com/meta HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden Connection: close Content-Type: text/html Request forbidden by administrative rules. Please make sure your request has a User-Agent header. Check https://developer.github.com for other possible causes.
Conditional requests
Most responses return an ETag
header. Many responses also return a Last-Modified
header. You can use the values of these headers to make subsequent requests to those resources using the If-None-Match
and If-Modified-Since
headers, respectively. If the resource has not changed, the server will return a 304 Not Modified
.
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 X-RateLimit-Reset: 1372700873 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 X-RateLimit-Reset: 1372700873 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 X-RateLimit-Reset: 1372700873
Cross origin resource sharing
The API supports Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) for AJAX requests from any origin. You can read the CORS W3C Recommendation, or this intro from the HTML 5 Security Guide.
Here's a sample request sent from a browser hitting http://example.com
:
curl -i https://api.github.com -H "Origin: http://example.com" HTTP/1.1 302 Found Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * Access-Control-Expose-Headers: ETag, Link, X-GitHub-OTP, X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining, X-RateLimit-Reset, X-OAuth-Scopes, X-Accepted-OAuth-Scopes, X-Poll-Interval
This is what the CORS preflight request looks like:
curl -i https://api.github.com -H "Origin: http://example.com" -X OPTIONS HTTP/1.1 204 No Content Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Authorization, Content-Type, If-Match, If-Modified-Since, If-None-Match, If-Unmodified-Since, X-GitHub-OTP, X-Requested-With Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, PATCH, PUT, DELETE Access-Control-Expose-Headers: ETag, Link, X-GitHub-OTP, X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining, X-RateLimit-Reset, X-OAuth-Scopes, X-Accepted-OAuth-Scopes, X-Poll-Interval Access-Control-Max-Age: 86400
JSON-P callbacks
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", "X-RateLimit-Reset": "1372700873", "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. Here's a minimal example you can try out:
<html>
<head>
<script type="text/javascript">
function foo(response) {
var meta = response.meta;
var data = response.data;
console.log(meta);
console.log(data);
}
var script = document.createElement('script');
script.src = 'https://api.github.com?callback=foo';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);
</script>
</head>
<body>
<p>Open up your browser's console.</p>
</body>
</html>
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:
{
"Link": [
[
"url1",
{
"rel": "next"
}
],
[
"url2",
{
"rel": "foo",
"bar": "baz"
}
]
]
}
Timezones
Some requests that create new data, such as creating a new commit, allow you to provide time zone information when specifying or generating timestamps. We apply the following rules, in order of priority, to determine timezone information for API calls.
- Explicitly providing an ISO 8601 timestamp with timezone information
- Using the
Time-Zone
header - Using the last known timezone for the user
- Defaulting to UTC without other timezone information
Explicitly providing an ISO 8601 timestamp with timezone information
For API calls that allow for a timestamp to be specified, we use that exact timestamp. An example of this is the Commits API.
These timestamps look something like 2014-02-27T15:05:06+01:00
. Also see this example for how these timestamps can be specified.
Using the Time-Zone
header
It is possible to supply a Time-Zone
header which defines a timezone according to the list of names from the Olson database.
curl -H "Time-Zone: Europe/Amsterdam" -X POST https://api.github.com/repos/github/linguist/contents/new_file.md
This means that we generate a timestamp for the moment your API call is made in the timezone this header defines. For example, the Contents API generates a git commit for each addition or change and uses the current time as the timestamp. This header will determine the timezone used for generating that current timestamp.
Using the last known timezone for the user
If no Time-Zone
header is specified and you make an authenticated call to the API, we use the last known timezone for the authenticated user. The last known timezone is updated whenever you browse the GitHub website.
Defaulting to UTC without other timezone information
If the steps above don't result in any information, we use UTC as the timezone to create the git commit.
https://developer.github.com/v3/