Using GitHub API for Automation

Tutorial 1 of 5

1. Introduction

This tutorial is designed to guide you through the process of using GitHub's API to automate tasks. By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to integrate GitHub's API into your projects and use it to automate tasks like fetching repositories, creating issues, managing pull requests, and more.

Prerequisites:
* Basic understanding of web APIs
* Familiarity with JavaScript (though the concepts can be applied to any programming language)
* A GitHub account

2. Step-by-Step Guide

GitHub API v3 offers a wide range of services, including managing repository data, issues, and pull requests. To use this API, we'll need to create a token from GitHub.

Generating a Personal Access Token

  1. On GitHub, navigate to Settings > Developer settings > Personal access tokens
  2. Click "Generate new token"
  3. Select the scopes for the token, then click "Generate token". Save this token, as it's needed for authentication.

Making Requests

We can now make requests to the GitHub API. For example, to get a list of repositories for a given user:

fetch('https://api.github.com/users/{username}/repos', {
  headers: {
    'Authorization': `token ${your_token}`
  }
})
.then(response => response.json())
.then(data => console.log(data))
.catch(error => console.error('Error:', error));

Replace {username} with the username you want to fetch repositories for, and ${your_token} with your personal access token.

3. Code Examples

Creating a New Repository

const repoData = {
  name: 'new_repo',
  description: 'This is a new repository',
  private: false
};

fetch('https://api.github.com/user/repos', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Authorization': `token ${your_token}`,
    'Accept': 'application/vnd.github.v3+json'
  },
  body: JSON.stringify(repoData)
})
.then(response => response.json())
.then(data => console.log(data))
.catch(error => console.error('Error:', error));

This code creates a new repository using the POST method. The repoData object defines the properties of the new repository. The Authorization header is used for authentication, and the Accept header specifies the version of the GitHub API to use.

Creating an Issue

const issueData = {
  title: 'New issue',
  body: 'This is a new issue'
};

fetch('https://api.github.com/repos/{username}/new_repo/issues', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Authorization': `token ${your_token}`,
    'Accept': 'application/vnd.github.v3+json'
  },
  body: JSON.stringify(issueData)
})
.then(response => response.json())
.then(data => console.log(data))
.catch(error => console.error('Error:', error));

This code creates a new issue in the new_repo repository. The issueData object defines the properties of the new issue.

4. Summary

We've learned how to generate a personal access token on GitHub, and use it to authenticate requests to the GitHub API. We've also learned how to fetch user repositories, and create new repositories and issues.

Next steps: Learn how to manage pull requests with the GitHub API, and explore other endpoints in the API.

Additional resources:
* GitHub API v3 Documentation
* MDN Web Docs: Using Fetch

5. Practice Exercises

  1. Write a script to fetch and log all the public repositories of a user.
  2. Write a script to create a new repository and then create an issue in it.
  3. Write a script to fetch and log all the issues in a repository.

Solutions and tips can be derived from the examples given in the tutorial. For further practice, try interacting with other parts of the GitHub API, like pull requests and commits.