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General API Information

Schema

All API access is over HTTP and starts with

http://github.com/api/v2/:format

where :format is one of 'yaml', 'json' or 'xml', specifying what the response data should be formatted in. For all of the rest of this documentation, we will be leaving off that part, since it is the same for every API call.

Authentication

How to authenticate as a user, simply pass login and token to any URL. Several of the calls will return extra data if you are authenticated as a user that owns the repository or has access to it as a collaborator. For example, a call to get information on one of your private repositories would be:

$ curl -F 'login=schacon' -F 'token=6ef8395fecf207165f1a82178ae1b984'
  http://github.com/api/v2/json/user/show/schacon | jsonpretty
{
  "user": {
    "company": "Logical Awesome",
    "name": "Scott Chacon",
    "following_count": 11,
    "blog": "http:\/\/jointheconversation.org",
    "public_repo_count": 52,
    "public_gist_count": 45,
    "disk_usage": 294392,
    "collaborators": 3,
    "plan": {
      "name": "small",
      "collaborators": 5,
      "space": 1228800,
      "private_repos": 10
    },
    "id": 70,
    "owned_private_repo_count": 10,
    "total_private_repo_count": 14,
    "private_gist_count": 11,
    "login": "schacon",
    "followers_count": 182,
    "created_at": "2008\/01\/27 09:19:28 -0800",
    "email": "schacon@gmail.com",
    "location": "Redwood City, CA"
  }
}

Secure Access

You can access any API call over HTTPS, though public data can also be accessed over HTTP.

JSON callbacks

If you send a 'callback' variable to any call, it will wrap the result JSON in that function, so you can automatically execute it.

$ curl http://github.com/api/v2/json/issues/list/schacon/simplegit/open?callback=myJsFunction
myJsFunction({"issues": [
{"user": "schacon", 
"updated_at": "2009/04/17 16:19:02 -0700", 
"body": "something", 
"title": "new", 
"number": 2, 
"votes": 0, 
"position": 1.0, 
"created_at": "2009/04/17 16:18:50 -0700", 
"state": "open"}
]});

Limitations

Currently we are limiting API calls to 60 per minute. This may change in the future, or possibly per user at some point, but if you try to access the API more than 60 times in a minute, it will start giving you "access denied" errors.