How to get a file via GitHub APIs

Question

I need to get the contents of a file hosted in a GitHub repo. I'd prefer to get a JSON response with metadata along with it. I've tried numerous URLs with cURL with to only get a response of {"message":"Not Found"}. I just need the URL structure. If it matters, it's from an organization on GitHub. Here's what I think should work but doesn't:

http://api.github.com/repos/<organization>/<repository>/git/branches/<branch>/<file>

Answer 1

As the description (located at http://developer.github.com/v3/repos/contents/) says:

/repos/:owner/:repo/contents/:path

An ajax code will be:

$.ajax({
    url: readme_uri,
    dataType: 'jsonp',
    success: function(results)
    {
        var content = results.data.content;
    });

Replace the readme_uri by the proper /repos/:owner/:repo/contents/:path.

Answer 2

This GitHub API page provides the full reference. The API endpoint for reading a file:

https://api.github.com/repos/{username}/{repository_name}/contents/{file_path}

{
  "encoding": "base64",
  "size": 5362,
  "name": "README.md",
  "content": "encoded content ...",
  "sha": "3d21ec53a331a6f037a91c368710b99387d012c1",
  ...
}

• Consider using a personal access token
  • Rate-limits (up to 60 per-hour for anonymous, up to 5,000 per-hour for authenticated) read more
  • Enable accessing files in private repos
• The file content in the response is base64 encoded string

Using curl, jq

Reading https://github.com/airbnb/javascript/blob/master/package.json using GitHub's API via curl and jq:

curl https://api.github.com/repos/airbnb/javascript/contents/package.json | jq -r ".content" | base64 --decode

Using Python

Reading https://github.com/airbnb/javascript/blob/master/package.json using GitHub's API in Python:

import base64
import json
import requests
import os


def github_read_file(username, repository_name, file_path, github_token=None):
    headers = {}
    if github_token:
        headers['Authorization'] = f"token {github_token}"
        
    url = f'https://api.github.com/repos/{username}/{repository_name}/contents/{file_path}'
    r = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
    r.raise_for_status()
    data = r.json()
    file_content = data['content']
    file_content_encoding = data.get('encoding')
    if file_content_encoding == 'base64':
        file_content = base64.b64decode(file_content).decode()

    return file_content


def main():
    github_token = os.environ['GITHUB_TOKEN']
    username = 'airbnb'
    repository_name = 'javascript'
    file_path = 'package.json'
    file_content = github_read_file(username, repository_name, file_path, github_token=github_token)
    data = json.loads(file_content)
    print(data['name'])


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

• Define an environment variable GITHUB_TOKEN before running