GitHub rest API is becoming more accessible: Open API Description is now open source

GitHubs rest API is  accessible

The Github Rest API is something of an industry reference for a well-designed API. In the future, interaction with the interface will become even easier: The company has now published an Open-API description of its own Rest-API under an open-source license.

The rest API of the versioning platform has been available since 2008, the application programming interface was first released just one month after the launch of github.com. Among developers, it is considered a prime example of good API design. For this reason, the platform has released an open-AI description of the API now - twelve years and three major revisions later - under an open-source license.

The Open API specification

The Open API specification is a programming language agnostic standard for describing http API, allowing both humans and machines to explore the possibilities of an API without first having to read the documentation or understand the implementation. The specification is considered an industry standard.

That’s in it

Github’s Open API description contains descriptions of over 600 operations of the in-house rest API. If you want to explore the API visually, you can download the fun in the form of a Postman collection. Programmatically, you can use the description to generate mock servers, test environments, and bindings for languages that are not supported by the official Github API clients.

The description is available in two the bundled version you have different, reusable objects are available. The objects defined within the component object can be referenced via properties outside the component object, otherwise they have no effect on the API. If you use tooling that does not support such inline references, you can use a dereferenced version.

Still in beta so far

Currently, the description is in the beta phase - describing a twelve-year-old API is not an easy task, the authors of the associated blog post write. The description was created about the use of a mixture of JSON schemas, documented examples and contract testing. Github is currently actively developing, and in the future the project will become a central part of the Github developer experience - both in- and externally.

For Github Enterprise Server and Github Private Instances, releases of the description should be available quarterly, more frequent updates should be available via github.com, according to the corresponding blog post. If you would like to participate in the open source project, you are of course welcome, all information can be found in the contribution guide of the description.