Downloading private patches from Github

Question

When a PR is created in the private repos of my organization, I receive emails from Github with links such as http://github.com/<my org>/<project>/<PR #>.patch. I would like to download such links with curl; as-is, I get a 404, and I can't seem to find the right incantation with -H "Authorization: <oauth token>" to make it work.

Answer 1

You can use Github API to do this, get the pull request with this API :

GET /repos/:owner/:repo/pulls/:number

You can use a personal access token with repos scope to get the result for a private repo with the authorization header : -H 'Authorization: token YOUR_TOKEN'

Use commits comparison and pull request media types :

• patch : application/vnd.github.VERSION.patch
• diff : application/vnd.github.VERSION.diff

The curl requests are :

• request patch for PR #18 :

  curl -H 'Authorization: token YOUR_TOKEN' \
       -H 'Accept: application/vnd.github.VERSION.patch' \
       https://api.github.com/repos/<my org>/<project>/pulls/18 
  

• request diff for PR #18

  curl -H 'Authorization: token YOUR_TOKEN' \
       -H 'Accept: application/vnd.github.VERSION.diff' \
       https://api.github.com/repos/<my org>/<project>/pulls/18