How to Use Github’s API with PHP

Github is one of the best ways to share code and collaborate. In this article, we are going to learn how to consume their API and how we can use it to accomplish some of our daily tasks.

What We’re Building

We are going to explore some of the daily tasks that can be accomplished through the Github API and build a small app using Laravel to illustrate the use cases. You can check the final result on Github.

Authorisation

Before starting to consume the API, we need to set some form of authorisation. The API gives you access to all publicly available data, but some endpoints need user permission. You can create a new token with some specific scope access using the application settings. The scopes depend on your application’s needs, like accessing user email, updating user profile, etc.

Password authorisation is only necessary in some special cases, like accessing user authorised applications. In that case, you need to provide your username or email, and your password.

Setting Up Our Application

For our sample app, I will be using Laravel 5 and the KnpLabs Github PHP implementation. Be sure to update your composer.json file. Rename .env.example to .env after creating a new Laravel project (composer create-project laravel/laravel) and update it with your credentials.

// .env
APP_DEBUG=true
GITHUB_EMAIL=USER_EMAIL
GITHUB_USERNAME=USERNAME
GITHUB_PASSWORD=PASSWORD
GITHUB_TOKEN=ACCESS_TOKEN 

Your don’t really need to add your username and password, we only use them to illustrate the limitation of using the token authentication.

Continue reading %How to Use Github’s API with PHP%

by Younes Rafie via SitePoint