Github user email is null, despite user:email scope

Question

I am following Github’s OAuth flow, and obtaining an access token that gives me access to the user’s email scope. When I exchange a code for an access token, using the https://github.com/login/oauth/access_token endpoint, I get the following response:

{   access_token: '83f42..xxx’,   token_type: 'bearer',   scope: 'user:email'  } 

Looks great. So I make this request, using the token to get my user data:

Accept-Language: en-us Accept: application/json Authorization: token 83f42..xxx Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate  GET https://api.github.com/user 

I do get my user object as a response, but the email property is null. Anyone else having this problem?

Answer 1

I found out why this occurs and how to resolve it. According to the docs:

Note: The returned email is the user's publicly visible email address (or null if the user has not specified a public email address in their profile).

In your GitHub profile settings, under Public email, some users (including myself) have that option set to "Don't show my email address." The call to /user only returns the public email address, so if the user doesn't want it shown, the API will respect that.

To get the user's email addresses regardless of whether or not they are public, use the call to /user/emails. You would use the access token in exactly the same way as the /user request:

Accept-Language: en-us Accept: application/json Authorization: token 83f42..xxx Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate  GET https://api.github.com/user/emails 

This call gave me the following JSON response:

[   {     "email": "[email protected]",     "primary": true,     "verified": true   } ]