About GitHub’s APIs

Two stable versions of GitHub’s API:

1. the REST API, currently v3

   request v3 via the ‘Accept’ header

   • All GitHub media types look like this:

     application/vnd.github[.version].param[+json]
     

     -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json"
     -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3.full+json"
     

   • The most basic media types the API supports are:

     application/json
     application/vnd.github+json
     

     Neither of these specify a version, so you will always get the current default JSON representation of resources.

   • You can specify a version like so:

     application/vnd.github.v3+json
     

   • If you’re specifying a property (such as text/full/raw/html/etc defined below), put the version before the property:

     application/vnd.github.v3.raw+json
     

   • You can check the current version through every response’s headers. Look for the X-GitHub-Media-Type header:

     -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.full+json"
     ==> X-GitHub-Media-Type: github.v3
     -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3.full+json"
     ==> X-GitHub-Media-Type: github.v3; param=full; format=json
     

2. the GraphQL API