JavaScript GitHub API for node.js

A node.js module, which provides an object oriented wrapper for the GitHub v2 API. This library is a direct port of php-github-api by Thibault Duplessis to JavaScript. The only major difference is that the JavaScript code is fully asynchronous.

Installation

Install with the node package manager npm:

  $ npm install github

or

Install via git clone:

  $ git clone git://github.com/ajaxorg/node-github.git
  $ cd node-github
  $ npm install

Example

Print all followers of the user "fjakobs" to the console.

var GitHubApi = require("github").GitHubApi;

var github = new GitHubApi(true);
github.getUserApi().getFollowers('fjakobs', function(err, followers) {
    console.log(followers.join('\n'));
});

First the GitHubApi class is imported from the github module. This class provides access to all of GitHub's APIs (e.g. user, commit or repository APIs). The getFollowers method lists all followers of a given GitHub user. Is is part of the user API. It takes the user name as first argument and a callback as last argument. Once the follower list is returned from the server, the callback is called.

Like in node.js callbacks are always the last argument. If the functions fails an error object is passed as first argument to the callback.

Authentication

Most GitHub API calls don't require authentication. As a rule of thumb: If you can see the information by visiting the site without being logged in, you don't have to be authenticated to retrieve the same information through the API. Of course calls, which change data or read sensitive information have to be authenticated.

You need the GitHub user name and the API key for authentication. The API key can be found in the user's Account Settings page.

This example shows how to authenticate and then change location field of the account settings to Argentina:

github.authenticate(username, token);
github.getUserApi().update(username, {location: "Argentina"}, function(err) {
    console.log("done!");
});

Note that the authenticate method is synchronous because it only stores the credentials for the next request.

Implemented GitHub APIs

• User API: 100%
• Commit API: 100%
• Object API: 100%
• Repository API: 90%, missing repo visibility, deploy keys
• Issues API: 100%
• Pulls API: only getList is implemented
• Gist API: 100% v1 Gist API implemented. 0% v3 API
• Network API: still missing

Running the Tests

The unit tests are based on the node-async-test module, which is provided as a git submodule. To run the tests make sure that the npm dependencies are installed by running npm install from the project directory.

Running all unit tests:

npm test

or

node lib/github_all_tests.js

The test classes can also be run separately. This will e.g. run the UserApi test:

node lib/github_test.js

Note that a connection to the internet is required to run the tests.

TODO

• API docs
  • fix and polish (there might still be some PHP-isms)
  • generate API documentation
• Documentation

LICENSE

MIT license. See the LICENSE file for details.

Credits

Thanks to Thibault Duplessis for the excellent php-github-api library, which is the blueprint of this library. Especially the unit tests proved to be very helpful.