An overview of the GitHub API

The GitHub API provides a REST-based interface using JSON to return information about users and repositories. Version 3 of the API is documented at https://developer.github.com/v3/ and is the version used in this book.

Tip

The API is rate limited; at the time of writing, anonymous requests can be made up to sixty times per hour, while logged in users have a higher limit. The code repository for this book has sample responses that can be used for testing and development purposes.

The root endpoint

The main entry point to GitHub is the root endpoint. For the main GitHub site this is https://api.github.com and for GitHub Enterprise installations it is https://hostname.example.org/api/v3/ along with user credentials. The endpoint provides a collection of URLs that can be used to find specific resources:

{
 ...
  "issue_search_url": "https://api.github.com/search/issues?q={query}{&page,per_page,sort,order}",
  "issues_url": "https://api.github.com/issues",
  "repository_url...