Playing with GitHub API – Octokit.Net

For a small project I’m working on, I needed access to GitHub, to investigate some repositories via code. Luckily, GitHub have an extremely extensive API. Furthermore, they even provide a .Net library (via a NuGet package) named Octokit.Net, to easily access that API:

Install-Package Octokit

Let’s see some samples. We’ll start by creating a new GitHubClient object:

var github = new GitHubClient(new ProductHeaderValue(TestGitHutAPI));

If you plan to use the API internally (using your own account, and not for your end-users), you can create a Personal access token in your profile at https://github.com/settings/applications, and then use that token as follow:

github.Credentials = new Credentials("Token goes here");

Alternatively, you can register your application in GitHub, and use the details to authorize your end-users via a regular OAuth2 flow:

var oauthLoginRequest = new OauthLoginRequest(clientId);
oauthLoginRequest.Scopes.Add(user);
oauthLoginRequest.Scopes.Add(public_repo);
var loginUrl = github.Oauth.GetGitHubLoginUrl(oauthLoginRequest); // Redirect your users to the LoginUrl

// You will receive thecodeused below in the Redirect URI configured in your GitHub application
var oauthTokenRequest = new OauthTokenRequest(clientId,clientSecret,code);
var oauthToken = await github.Oauth.CreateAccessToken(oauthTokenRequest);
github.Credentials = new Credentials(oauthToken.AccessToken);

We are now ready to do something with the GitHubClient. Let’s do a search for repositories:

var searchRepositoriesRequest = new SearchRepositoriesRequest("nosql")
{
    Language = Language.CSharp,
    Fork = ForkQualifier.ExcludeForks,
    Sort = RepoSearchSort.Stars,
    Order = SortDirection.Descending,
    PerPage = 10
};
SearchRepositoryResult searchRepositoryResult = await github.Search.SearchRepo(searchRepositoriesRequest);

This will search for repositories that have the term NoSQL in them, that use the C# language. We will get the first 10 repositories, based on a descending number of Stars, and we’ll not get any Forked repositories. This is quite straight forward. Let’s see another sample, this one of searching for files inside a given repository:

var codeSearch = new SearchCodeRequest(".csproj")
{
    Repo = repository.FullName,
    In = new[] {CodeInQualifier.Path}
};
var codeResult = await github.Search.SearchCode(codeSearch);

This will search for all files that have CSPROJ in their path (which will result in all the C# Project files) within the given repository (based on the repository’s FullName).

Lastly, let’s see how we can retrieve the content of a file that we received in the above search. We’ll need the Login of the repository’s owner, the repository name, and the file’s SHA (which functions as a version/id for the purpose of this request):

var blob = await github.GitDatabase.Blob.Get(repo.Owner.Login, repo.Name, packageFile.Sha);
var contentBase64 = blob.Content;
var content = Convert.FromBase64String(contentBase64);

The Octokit.Net package is very comprehensive, and provides access to the following information in GitHub:

• Activities
• Deployment
• Gist
• GitDatabase
• Issues
• Notifications
• Organizations
• Releases
• Repositories
• Search
• Users

You can find the GitHub API documentation here: https://developer.github.com/v3/