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I am looking for a python library for the Github APIv3 suitable for me.

I found one library (python-github3) mentioned in the GH API docs. After playing around with it in ipython for an hour or two, I found it really unintuitive to explore/work with. I looked some more, and found there's quite a number of people at least attempting to write such a library. The more promising-looking (at a glance) are PyGithub and another python-github3, which apparently is different from the first one.

Before I spend the next days consecutively trying out library after library, I wanted to ask the SO community if there is an accepted, definitive, obvious choice for that library?

What I didn't like about the first library was the (to me) unintuitive way to get at data - some things you get as attributes, some you get as return value of a method, that return value is some complicated object which has to be paged and iterated through, etc.

In that regard, PyGithub looks more attractive at first glance - clearly drill down through an object hierarchy, and then arrive at the attribute containing what you want:

for repo in g.get_user().get_repos(): print repo.name

So, any pearls of wisdom to share? I know I don't have skills enough to quickly judge library quality, which is why I'm turning to the SO community.

edit: fwiw, I ended up using PyGithub. It works well, and the author is really receptive for feedback and bug reports. :-)

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  • It might be worth asking some of the github team. Commented May 16, 2012 at 19:27
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    fwiw, I ended up using PyGithub. It works well, and the author is really receptive for feedback and bug reports. :-) Commented Jul 17, 2012 at 14:01
  • I sorted all the alternatives by stars on GitHub, compared the results with this answer and chose PyGithub. Supports Python 3, seems it's well documented... I have no time to try them all and no other way to make my decision. Commented Oct 31, 2013 at 12:24

3 Answers 3

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Since you mentioned you are a beginner python programmer, I would suggest you to try to use the JSON API without any Github library first. It really isn't that difficult and it will help you a lot later in your programming life since same approach can be applied to any JSON API. Especially if it seems that trying out libraries will take days.

I'm not saying that some library isn't easier to use, I'm just saying the small extra effort to use the API directly might be worth it in the long run. At least it will help you understand why some of those libraries seem "unintuitive" (as you said).

Simple example to fetch creation time of django repository:

import requests
import json
r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/repos/django/django')
if(r.ok):
    repoItem = json.loads(r.text or r.content)
    print "Django repository created: " + repoItem['created_at']

This is using the popular requests library. In your code you'll naturally need to handle the error cases too.

If you need access with authentication it will be a bit more complex.

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9 Comments

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+1 for mentioning requests, which I hadn't previously encountered. Looks nifty.
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btw, this should be r.content, not r.text ('Response' object has no attribute 'text')
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@Christoph r.text should work if response is JSON. r.content returns the bytes directly without decoding them. The requests library seems to internally use (r.text or r.content) phrase, maybe you should do that too. I'm not sure why you can't see the text property.
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Well I don't know what's going on, but I put your original example into ipython as-is (except for correcting mangled indentation), and got AttributeError: 'Response' object has no attribute 'text'
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If I say json.loads(r.content or r.text) in the edited one, it works btw.
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In the end, I ended up using PyGithub. It works well, and the author is really receptive for feedback and bug reports. :-)

(Adapted from my edit to the original question, for better visibility)

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17

Documentation is horrible for PyGitHub, but the product is great. Here is a quick sample for actually retrieving a file, changing it with a new comment at the beginning of the file and committing it back

from github import Github
gh = Github(login_or_token='.....', base_url='...../api/v3')
user = gh.get_user()
repo = user.get_repo("RepoName")
file = repo.get_file_contents("/App/forms.py")
decoded_content = "# Test " + "\r\n" + file.decoded_content
repo.update_file("/"RepoName"/forms.py", "Commit Comments", decoded_content, file.sha)
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4 Comments

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Is it? I haven't used it in ages, but afaik it's still maintained - maybe open an issue about this? Btw, PyGithub is one of few examples of a successful maintenance hand-over, where the original creator didn't have time anymore, and asked for volunteers.
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Thanks for this example, I don't get how someone can spend months developing their project and don't bother to write couple paragraphs describing how to use it.
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I found the documentation at pygithub.readthedocs.io/en/latest worked well for what I needed to do. The documentation may not be well-maintained for the latest features, and it may not have contained all the examples I wanted (Google took care of the rest,) but it worked okay for me.
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PyGithub also does not support a setting customs headers, like "Accept" for content rendering, so you cannot tell GH to render Markdown to HTML and display it. Learnt the hard way.

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