How to Look at Your GitHub API Rate Limits

If you're using any GitHub client library worth its salt, it'll have a way to look at your current rate limits and expiry times. I have lots of tools using my GitHub account, however, and wanted an independent way to look at this data.

Luckily, if you have a Personal Access Token (PAT) it's easy to do so.

Place your personal access token in ~/.githubtoken (or any file of your choice) and then you can do this:

curl https://api.github.com/rate_limit -H "Authorization: token $(cat ~/.githubtoken)"

However, I wanted to be able to use the information in a Ruby script and to show the number of seconds until a quota were to reset, so this Ruby code fits the bill:

require 'http'
require 'json'

TOKEN = File.read(ENV['HOME'] + "/.githubtoken").strip

res = HTTP["Authorization" => "token #{TOKEN}"].get("https://api.github.com/rate_limit")
rates = JSON.parse(res.to_s)

def convert_epoch_to_seconds_remaining(r)
  r["resets_in_seconds"] = (Time.at(r["reset"].to_i) - Time.now).ceil if r["reset"]
  r.values.each { |rr| convert_epoch_to_seconds_remaining(rr) if rr.is_a?(Hash) }
end

convert_epoch_to_seconds_remaining(rates)

puts rates.to_json

The only dependency is the http gem, but you should have this anyway as it's fantastic. If you'd rather have no dependencies, you could use open-uri like so:

require 'json'
require 'open-uri'

TOKEN = File.read(ENV['HOME'] + "/.githubtoken").strip

res = open("https://api.github.com/rate_limit", "Authorization" => "token #{TOKEN}").read
rates = JSON.parse(res.to_s)

def convert_epoch_to_seconds_remaining(r)
  r["resets_in_seconds"] = (Time.at(r["reset"].to_i) - Time.now).ceil if r["reset"]
  r.values.each { |rr| convert_epoch_to_seconds_remaining(rr) if rr.is_a?(Hash) }
end

convert_epoch_to_seconds_remaining(rates)

puts rates.to_json

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How to Look at Your GitHub API Rate Limits

Peter Cooper

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