Github API: Getting topics of a Github repository

Question

Github API documentation give instructions to filter repositories by topics. Is there a way to use the API to get the topics from a specific repo?

Answer 1

You can do this easily with Github API (it's currently in "preview mode"):

curl -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.mercy-preview+json" https://api.github.com/repos/twbs/bootstrap/topics
{
  "names": [
    "css",
    "bootstrap",
    "javascript",
    "html",
    "jekyll-site",
    "scss",
    "css-framework",
    "sass"
  ]
}

You need to include extra header Accept: application/vnd.github.mercy-preview+json.

There is one "but", since it's in "preview mode" it's not supported for production use (please read "Note" and "Warning" sections in link below).

See also:

• https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/repos#get-a-repository

Answer 2

I don't know that there is a way to just get the topics for a repository, but if you do a get for a repository, the repository json object that is returned will have a topics property that is an array of that repositories topics.

At the top of that page of documentation, you will notice that in order to have the topics returned you will need to add a specific header in your GET request: "Accept":"application/vnd.github.mercy-preview+json"

Hope this helps!

Answer 3

You can do this with the Github GraphQL API

Query:

{
  repository(owner: "twbs", name: "bootstrap") {
    repositoryTopics(first: 10) {
      edges {
        node {
          topic {
            name
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

This will return the first 10 topics and the name for each as shown below.
Response:

{
  "data": {
    "repository": {
      "repositoryTopics": {
        "edges": [
          {
            "node": {
              "topic": {
                "name": "css"
              }
            }
          },
          {
            "node": {
              "topic": {
                "name": "bootstrap"
              }
            }
          },
          {
            "node": {
              "topic": {
                "name": "javascript"
              }
            }
          },
          {
            "node": {
              "topic": {
                "name": "html"
              }
            }
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

Test it out in the GitHub GraphQL Explorer

Answer 4

I added the fetch with Accept Headers:

fetch("https://api.github.com/users/lucksp/repos", 
   {
    method: "GET",
    headers: {
    Accept: "application/vnd.github.mercy-preview+json"
   }
})