Getting Github individual file contributors

Question

I am planning to build a plug-in for Sphinx documentation system plug-in which shows the names and Github profile links of the persons who have contributed to the documentation page.

Github has this feature internally

• Is it possible to get Github profile links of the file contributors through Github API? Note that commiter emails are not enough, one must be able to map them to a Github user profile link. Also note that I don't want all repository contributors - just individual file contributors.

• If this is not possible then what kind of alternative methods (private API, scraping) you could suggest to extract this information from Github?

Answer 1

First, you can show the commits for a given file:

https://api.github.com/repos/:owner/:repo/commits?path=PATH_TO_FILE

For instance:

https://api.github.com/repos/git/git/commits?path=README

Second, that JSON response does, in the author section, contain an url filed named 'html_url' to the GitHub profile:

"author": {
      "login": "gitster",
      "id": 54884,
      "avatar_url": "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/750680c9dcc7d0be3ca83464a0da49d8?d=https%3A%2F%2Fidenticons.github.com%2Ff8e73a1fe6b3a5565851969c2cb234a7.png",
      "gravatar_id": "750680c9dcc7d0be3ca83464a0da49d8",
      "url": "https://api.github.com/users/gitster",   
      "html_url": "https://github.com/gitster",       <==========
      "followers_url": "https://api.github.com/users/gitster/followers",
      "following_url": "https://api.github.com/users/gitster/following{/other_user}",
      "gists_url": "https://api.github.com/users/gitster/gists{/gist_id}",
      "starred_url": "https://api.github.com/users/gitster/starred{/owner}{/repo}",
      "subscriptions_url": "https://api.github.com/users/gitster/subscriptions",
      "organizations_url": "https://api.github.com/users/gitster/orgs",
      "repos_url": "https://api.github.com/users/gitster/repos",
      "events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/gitster/events{/privacy}",
      "received_events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/gitster/received_events",
      "type": "User"
    },

So you shouldn't need to scrape any web page here.

---

Here is a very crude jsfiddle to illustrate that, based on the javascript extract:

var url = "https://api.github.com/repos/git/git/commits?path=" + filename
$.getJSON(url, function(data) {
    var twitterList = $("<ul />");
    $.each(data, function(index, item) {
        if(item.author) {
            $("<li />", {
                "text": item.author.html_url
            }).appendTo(twitterList);
        }
    });

Answer 2

Using GraphQL API v4, you can use :

{
  repository(owner: "torvalds", name: "linux") {
    object(expression: "master") {
      ... on Commit {
        history(first: 100, path: "MAINTAINERS") {
          nodes {
            author {
              email
              name
              user {
                email
                name
                avatarUrl
                login
                url
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Try it in the explorer

Using curl & jq to have a list of the first 100 contributors of this file without duplicates :

TOKEN=<YOUR_TOKEN>
OWNER=torvalds
REPO=linux
BRANCH=master
FILEPATH=MAINTAINERS
curl -s -H "Authorization: token $TOKEN" \
     -H  "Content-Type:application/json" \
     -d '{ 
          "query": "{repository(owner: \"'"$OWNER"'\", name: \"'"$REPO"'\") {object(expression: \"'"$BRANCH"'\") { ... on Commit { history(first: 100, path: \"'"$FILEPATH"'\") { nodes { author { email name user { email name avatarUrl login url}}}}}}}}"
      }' https://api.github.com/graphql | \
      jq '[.data.repository.object.history.nodes[].author| {name,email}]|unique'