github-rest-api_skill

Overview

This skill documents the GitHub REST API surface and practical usage for actions, activity, apps, authentication, and billing. It consolidates endpoint descriptions, request/response patterns, rate limit behavior, and recommended workflows to help developers integrate with GitHub programmatically. Use it to find canonical REST endpoints, authentication methods, and best practices for interacting with GitHub services.

How this skill works

The skill indexes official REST API reference content and organizes it by resource area (actions, repos, issues, orgs, apps, billing, etc.). For a given topic it returns endpoint details, required headers and parameters, authentication options, common response codes, and links to related guidance like rate limits and conditional requests. It highlights practical examples and common pitfalls so you can build robust integrations faster.

When to use it

• When you need the correct REST endpoint and HTTP method for a GitHub resource.
• When deciding how to authenticate requests (PAT, OAuth, GitHub App tokens).
• When handling rate limits, conditional requests, or pagination.
• When integrating Actions artifacts, runners, or caches via the API.
• When managing organization resources: members, projects, billing, or secrets.

Best practices

• Make authenticated requests to raise rate limits and enable scoped access.
• Use conditional requests (If-None-Match / ETag) to reduce bandwidth and avoid unnecessary updates.
• Respect pagination and secondary rate limits; implement backoff and retries.
• Prefer GitHub Apps tokens for fine-grained permissions and installation-scoped access.
• Avoid polling; use webhooks where possible to get real-time events.

Example use cases

• Create and manage GitHub Actions artifacts and list organization self-hosted runners.
• Retrieve repository metadata, readme files, or branch protection rules programmatically.
• Issue and review organization invitations, and inspect fine-grained PAT access requests.
• Query billing budgets and update organization budget settings via the API.
• Automate project board items, list project fields, and add draft items to projects.