Randomly sample Github repositories

Question

I'm looking for a solution to randomly sample repos from Github. The final result is to perform some data analysis on the sample.

What I would like to do is sample by the repository's id: sample an int between 0 and 2.7 million and find the associated repo. After I have the username/repo-name, I'll use the api to get details.

The problem is I do not know how to search by repo id. Any suggestions? I'm open to webscraping or Python solutions.

Answer 1

You can use python to access GitHUb V3 Api (as in "Most suitable python library for Github API v3").

And you can access GitHub repos, from a certain id (GET /repositories, with as parameter, integer ID of the last Repository that you’ve seen: so that can provide a roundabout way to access repos with their id.