Building Tools with GitHub

Chapter 1. The Unclad GitHub API

This chapter eases us into reading and writing data from the GitHub API. Successive chapters show you how to access information from the GitHub API using a variety of client libraries. These client libraries, by design, hide the nuts and bolts of the API from you, providing streamlined and idiomatic methods to view and modify data inside a Git repository hosted on GitHub. This chapter, however, gives you a naked viewpoint of the GitHub API and documents the details of the raw HTTP requests and responses. It also discusses the different ways to access public and private data inside of GitHub and where limitations exist. And it gives you an overview of the options for accessing GitHub data when running inside a web browser context where network access is restrained.

cURL

There will be times when you want to quickly access information from the GitHub API without writing a formal program. Or, when you want to quickly get access to the raw HTTP request headers and content. Or, where you might even question the implementation of a client library and need confirmation it is doing the right thing from another vantage point. In these situations, cURL, a simple command-line HTTP tool, is the perfect fit. cURL, like the best Unix tools, is a small program with a very specific and purposefully limited set of features for accessing HTTP servers.

cURL, like the HTTP protocol it speaks intimately, is stateless: we will explore solutions to this limitation in ...