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python requests github

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 1 min read

Python Requests GitHub

Have you ever needed to interact with the GitHub API using Python? The Python requests library makes it easy to do so.

Using Requests Library

To use Python to interact with the GitHub API, you first need to make sure that you have the requests library installed. You can do this by running the following command:


!pip install requests

Once you have the requests library installed, you can start using it to interact with the GitHub API. Here's an example of how to use the requests library to get information about a GitHub user:


import requests

username = 'octocat'
url = f'https://api.github.com/users/{username}'
response = requests.get(url)

if response.ok:
    data = response.json()
    print(data['name'])
else:
    print(f'Request failed with status code {response.status_code}')

In this example, we're sending a GET request to the GitHub API's /users/{username} endpoint. We're then checking to make sure that the response was successful (i.e., had a status code of 200). If the response was successful, we're converting the response data from JSON format to a Python dictionary and then printing the user's name.

Authenticating with GitHub

If you need to authenticate with the GitHub API (which is likely in most cases), you can do so by passing an auth parameter to the requests function. Here's an example:


import requests

username = 'octocat'
password = 'my_password'
url = f'https://api.github.com/users/{username}'
response = requests.get(url, auth=(username, password))

if response.ok:
    data = response.json()
    print(data['name'])
else:
    print(f'Request failed with status code {response.status_code}')

In this example, we're passing a tuple of the username and password to the auth parameter of the requests function. This tells requests to use basic authentication when making the request to the GitHub API.

Conclusion

The Python requests library makes it easy to interact with the GitHub API using Python. By following the examples provided above, you should be able to start using the requests library to get information from GitHub and even update your own repositories.

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