Accessing GitHub data

There are various ways to access data from GitHub just like we have seen in the previous chapters for other social media platforms. If you are using R, you can go ahead and use the rgithub package which provides a high level interface with several functions to retrieve data from GitHub. Besides that, you can also register an application with GitHub to get an OAuth-based access token which can be used to gain access to GitHub's own API. We will cover both mechanisms briefly in this section.

Using the rgithub package for data access

As we mentioned earlier, there is a specific package in R known as rgithub which provides high level functions and interfaces to access GitHub data. You can install and load the package in R using the following code snippet:

library(devtools)
install_github("cscheid/rgithub")
library(github)

Of course, you would then need a GitHub application ID and secret token to gain seamless access to the data without too many restrictions...