GitHub jsonp source code api

Question

Does GitHub have a jsonp api for the source of a file? I know BitBucket has, but I can't find any information for GitHubs (assuming they have one).

Do they not? If not, then bummer...

Answer 1

This is an old question nowadays you can get to the source through: https://raw.githubusercontent.com

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ user / repository / branch / directory / file

e.g. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sachatrauwaen/OpenContent-Templates/master/Bootstrap3Accordion/schema.json

Answer 2

There is an API to get the contents of data from github. It's part of the v3 github API.

You make a request to

https://api.github.com/repos/{username}/{repository name}/contents/{filepath and name}

e.g. https://api.github.com/repos/mono/monodevelop/contents/README

Unless you set the accepts header, you'll receive back some JSON with the file contents encoded in base64. You'll have to decode this, something that is very easy in node.js, but more of a pain in the browser. You can find base64 decoders in javascript in other questions on stackoverflow fairly easily. One thing to notice, the base64 code you get back from github has newline characters in it to make it format nicely and many base64 decoders can't cope with newlines, so you might need to remove them or modify the decoder.

You probably just want the content and don't need the other stuff in the json (such as sha and length, etc), so you can make your life easier by setting the Accept header to application/vnd.github.3.raw.

Here's an example with the accepts header using curl:

curl -i https://api.github.com/repos/mono/monodevelop/contents/README --header "Accept: application/vnd.github.3.raw"

Now, if you're using node or curl, that's probably fine, but if you're running inside the browser, to do that you'll need to use CORS. Github only allow access from hosts that are registered as OAuth Applications. It's not particularly difficult to do this, but for my usecase (a bookmarketlet), that wasn't an option.

There is a way to get access without using CORS, and that is with JSONP, you can add e.g. ?callback=_processGithubResponse to get javascript output suitable for including with a script tag (that calls a function called _processGithubResponse with the response). Unfortunately you can't set an accepts header on that, so you're stuck with decoding base64 in this case.

If you are using node.js, I would recommend you use node-github which makes the API slightly easier to use.