The Complete Guide to the GitHub API

The GitHub REST API provides access to nearly everything on the platform. Unauthenticated requests are limited to 60 per hour, which is sufficient for casual browsing but insufficient for data-heavy applications. Authentication via OAuth tokens raises this to 5,000 requests per hour. Key endpoints include user profiles, repository searches, commit history, issue tracking, and code search. Pagination uses Link headers with a default of 30 items per page and a maximum of 100. For analytics, the Search API is the most powerful tool, allowing complex queries with language filters, date ranges, and star counts. Our profiler caches all API responses in Cloudflare KV to stay within rate limits while providing fast results.