Best practices for using the REST API

Follow these best practices when using GitHub's API.

In this article

Avoid polling

You should subscribe to webhook events instead of polling the API for data. This will help your integration stay within the API rate limit. For more information, see Webhooks documentation.

If you cannot use webhooks and you must poll the API, poll as efficiently as possible to avoid exceeding the rate limit:

  • Poll only as often as you need to, on a fixed schedule. If a response includes an x-poll-interval header, wait at least that many seconds before you poll the same endpoint again.
  • Make authenticated conditional requests, so that unchanged data does not count against your primary rate limit. For more information, see Use conditional requests.
  • Request only the data that you need, and keep responses stable, so that more of your polls return 304 Not Modified. For more information, see Make requests that can be cached.

Make authenticated requests

Authenticated requests have a higher primary rate limit than unauthenticated requests. To avoid exceeding the rate limit, you should make authenticated requests. For more information, see Rate limits for the REST API.

Avoid concurrent requests

To avoid exceeding secondary rate limits, you should make requests serially instead of concurrently. To achieve this, you can implement a queue system for requests.

Pause between mutative requests

If you are making a large number of POST, PATCH, PUT, or DELETE requests, wait at least one second between each request. This will help you avoid secondary rate limits.

Handle rate limit errors appropriately

If you receive a rate limit error, you should stop making requests temporarily according to these guidelines:

  • If the retry-after response header is present, you should not retry your request until after that many seconds has elapsed.
  • If the x-ratelimit-remaining header is 0, you should not make another request until after the time specified by the x-ratelimit-reset header. The x-ratelimit-reset header is in UTC epoch seconds.
  • Otherwise, wait for at least one minute before retrying. If your request continues to fail due to a secondary rate limit, wait for an exponentially increasing amount of time between retries, and throw an error after a specific number of retries.

Continuing to make requests while you are rate limited may result in the banning of your integration.

To learn about viewing an organization's API activity, including which requests exceeded primary rate limits, see Viewing API insights in your organization.

Follow redirects

The GitHub REST API uses HTTP redirection where appropriate. You should assume that any request may result in a redirection. Receiving an HTTP redirection is not an error, and you should follow the redirect.

A 301 status code indicates permanent redirection. You should repeat your request to the URL specified by the location header. Additionally, you should update your code to use this URL for future requests.

A 302 or 307 status code indicates temporary redirection. You should repeat your request to the URL specified by the location header. However, you should not update your code to use this URL for future requests.

Other redirection status codes may be used in accordance with HTTP specifications.

Do not manually parse URLs

Many API endpoints return URL values for fields in the response body. You should not try to parse these URLs or to predict the structure of future URLs. This can cause your integration to break if GitHub changes the structure of the URL in the future. Instead, you should look for a field that contains the information that you need. For example, the endpoint to create an issue returns an html_url field with a value like https://github.com/octocat/Hello-World/issues/1347 and a number field with a value like 1347. If you need to know the number of the issue, use the number field instead of parsing the html_url field.

Similarly, you should not try to manually construct pagination queries. Instead, you should use the link headers to determine what pages of results you can request. For more information, see Using pagination in the REST API.

Use conditional requests

Most endpoints return an etag header, and many endpoints return a last-modified header. You can use the values of these headers to make conditional GET requests. If the response has not changed, you will receive a 304 Not Modified response. Making a conditional request does not count against your primary rate limit if a 304 response is returned and the request was made while correctly authorized with an Authorization header. This makes conditional requests especially useful when you poll an endpoint, because each 304 Not Modified response is fast and does not use your rate limit.

In the following examples, replace YOUR-TOKEN with your access token.

To make a conditional request with an etag:

  1. Make a request and save the value of the etag header from the response.

    curl --include --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR-TOKEN" https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Spoon-Knife/pulls

    The response includes an etag header: