Building Tools with GitHub

Chapter 4. Python and the Search API

Once you have enough data, no amount of organization will make everything easy to find. As Google has taught us, the only system that works at this scale is a search box. When you use GitHub, you’re exposed to both sides of this phenomenon: the repositories you have direct access to—which are relatively small in number—are given a single level of hierarchy, so you can keep them straight in your head. For the rest, the uncountable millions of public repositories that belong to other people, there’s a search box, with powerful features to help you find what you’re looking for.

Helpfully, GitHub also exposes this capability as an API you can consume from your own applications. GitHub’s Search API gives you access to the full power of the built-in search function. This includes the use of logical and scoping operators, like "or" and "user". By integrating this feature with your application, you can provide your users a very powerful way of finding what they’re looking for.

In this chapter we’ll take a close look at this API, and try building a useful application with it. We’ll see how the Search API is structured, what kind of results come back, and how it can help us create a feature for someone on our team.

Search API General Principles

The Search API is split into four separate parts: repositories, code, issues, and users. These APIs all have different subject matter, and have different formats for their results, but they all behave the same ...