Ruby-GitHub: Simple Access to the GitHub API

Posted by on April 1st, 2008.

While the GitHub folks have produced their own github-gem that provides some useful command-line tools for GitHub users, the library they have written isn’t your traditional API wrapper since it’s focused around using GitHub rather than getting information from GitHub.

I’ve thrown together a small library called ruby-github that provides that kind of functionality. It’s extremely simple and works with all of the currently available API but that only comes down to three read-only calls at this point. Use like so:

user = GitHub::API.user('mbleigh')
user.name # => "Michael Bleigh" 
user.repositories # => array of repositories
user.repositories.last.name # => "ruby-github" 
user.repositories.last.url # => "http://github.com/mbleigh/ruby-github" 
user.repositories.last.commits # => array of commits (see below)

commits = GitHub::API.commits('mbleigh','ruby-github')
commits.first.message # => "Moved github.rb to ruby-github.rb..." 
commits.first.id # => "1d8c21062e11bb1ecd51ab840aa13d906993f3f7" 

commit = GitHub::API.commit('mbleigh','ruby-github','1d8c21062e11bb1ecd51ab840aa13d906993f3f7')
commit.message # => "Moved github.rb to ruby-github.rb..." 
commit.added.collect{|c| c.filename} # => ["init.rb", "lib/ruby-github.rb"]

Installation

The easiest way to install ruby-github is as a gem:

gem install ruby-github

You can also install it as a Rails plugin if that’s your thing:

git clone git://github.com/mbleigh/ruby-github.git  vendor/plugins/ruby-github

Update 4/12/2008: Version 0.0.2 of the gem has been released and I have revised this post to adhere to the new gem’s requirements.

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1 Response to “Ruby-GitHub: Simple Access to the GitHub API”

  1. Ben Hughes April 13th, 2008 at 10:48 PM

    When trying to install I'm getting: ruby-github requires mash >= 0.0.2 (>= 0) Not sure why, gem list says I do have mash 0.0.2 and even if not it should grab the dependency anyways: bhmb:src bhughes$ gem list | grep mash mash (0.0.2)


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