Free APIDev ToolsAPI keyOfficial
GitHub REST API
Read repos, issues, users, releases and code search straight from github.com
The official GitHub REST API exposes repositories, issues, pull requests, users, commits, releases, gists and code search. Most read endpoints work anonymously; a free personal access token raises limits and unlocks private data. It is the canonical way to pull repo metadata, star counts and file contents programmatically.
Free tier
Free; unauthenticated 60 req/hour, authenticated with a free token 5,000 req/hourRate limits
60 req/hour unauthenticated (per IP); 5,000 req/hour with a personal access token. Search API has its own lower cap (30 req/min authenticated, 10 req/min unauthenticated) plus secondary abuse-detection limits (~900 points/min for REST).Auth
API keyBase URL
https://api.github.comWhat you'd build with it
- Harvest live star counts and metadata for an open-source catalogue
- Pull a repo's SKILL.md or README contents into a skill at runtime
- Search GitHub for repos matching a topic to enrich an automation
- Watch for new releases and emit a changelog feed entry
Key endpoints
- GET
/repos/{owner}/{repo}Repository metadata including stars, forks, language, topics - GET
/repos/{owner}/{repo}/contents/{path}Fetch a file or directory listing (base64 file content) - GET
/users/{username}Public profile data for a user or org - GET
/search/repositoriesSearch repositories by keyword, language, stars - GET
/repos/{owner}/{repo}/releases/latestLatest published release with assets
Members
Members get the runnable recipe
Sign in free to copy the example request, see a sample response, and read the gotchas.
Tags
gitcodedevelopersearchmetadata