gidgethub — An async library for calling GitHub’s API

While there are many GitHub libraries for Python, when this library was created there were none oriented towards asynchronous usage. On top of that, there were also no libraries which took a sans-I/O approach to their design. Because of that, this project was created.

This project has three primary layers to it. The base layer is gidgethub.sansio and gidgethub.routing which provide the tools necessary to work with GitHub’s API. The next layer up is gidgethub.abc which provides an abstract base class for a cleaner, unified API. Finally, the top layer is using an implementation of the abstract base class, e.g. gidgethub.aiohttp.

Quickstart

Here is a complete example of a production server that responds to webhooks which will add a needs review label to all new pull requests (this is taken from the Bedevere bot used by the Python project; the only change is inlining some code and showing code responding to only a single type of webhook event):

import asyncio
import importlib
import os
import sys
import traceback

import aiohttp
from aiohttp import web
import cachetools
from gidgethub import aiohttp as gh_aiohttp
from gidgethub import routing
from gidgethub import sansio


router = routing.Router()
cache = cachetools.LRUCache(maxsize=500)


@router.register("pull_request", action="opened")
async def opened_pr(event, gh, *arg, **kwargs):
    """Mark new PRs as needing a review."""
    pull_request = event.data["pull_request"]
    await gh.post(pull_request["labels_url"], data=["needs review"])


async def main(request):
    try:
        body = await request.read()
        secret = os.environ.get("GH_SECRET")
        event = sansio.Event.from_http(request.headers, body, secret=secret)
        print('GH delivery ID', event.delivery_id, file=sys.stderr)
        if event.event == "ping":
            return web.Response(status=200)
        oauth_token = os.environ.get("GH_AUTH")
        async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
            gh = gh_aiohttp.GitHubAPI(session, "brettcannon/gidgethub-example",
                                      oauth_token=oauth_token,
                                      cache=cache)
            # Give GitHub some time to reach internal consistency.
            await asyncio.sleep(1)
            await router.dispatch(event, gh)
        try:
            print('GH requests remaining:', gh.rate_limit.remaining)
        except AttributeError:
            pass
        return web.Response(status=200)
    except Exception as exc:
        traceback.print_exc(file=sys.stderr)
        return web.Response(status=500)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = web.Application()
    app.router.add_post("/", main)
    port = os.environ.get("PORT")
    if port is not None:
        port = int(port)
web.run_app(app, port=port)

Motivation

The vast majority of users will want to use one of the concrete implementations, but for those that have an HTTP library which is not supported or simply want the base tools, this library will still be useful. And the higher-level API has been designed to abstract away GitHub-specific details in making API calls, but it does not try to separate you from the GitHub API itself, e.g. to get the details of the bug label for this project you don’t call something like:

org("brettcannon").repo("gidgethub").label("bug")

Instead, you call:

await gh.getitem("/repos/brettcannon/gidgethub/labels/bug")

This makes it so that you can follow GitHub’s documentation for their API closely. You also don’t have to wait for an update to this library to use new features of the GitHub API.

Installation

Gidgethub is on PyPI.

python3 -m pip install gidgethub

Contents

About the title

With there being so many pre-existing GitHub libraries, it was tough to come up with a new name. So in the end I just named it after my cat. 😊

“Gidget” sounds somewhat like an elongated version of “git” so that made some sense phonetically. And with the octocat being the mascot of GitHub, it seemed fitting to have the name to be feline-related somehow.