Ok, I’m too lazy to go through the web interface every time I want to add a new github repo. github api to the rescue…

The goal

I want

git create myrepo "my repo description"

to create a new github repo ‘myrepo’.

manually

Grab your API Token from your github account, “Account Settings” – “Account Admin”.

Use curl

curl -u "mmm/token:XXXXXXXX" https://github.com/api/v2/json/user/show/mmm | jsonpretty

curl -X POST -u "mmm/token:XXXXXXXX" https://github.com/api/v2/json/repos/create -d "name=junk2&description=morejunk2"

or the same thing using restclient (sudo gem install rest-client):

restclient get https://github.com/api/v2/json/user/show/mmm mmm token:XXXXXXXX | jsonpretty 

echo '{"name":"junk3","description":"junk3 description"}' | restclient post https://github.com/api/v2/json/repos/create mmm token:XXXXXXXX

Github docs say you should send at least name but it will take any of these as POST args:

• name => name of the repository. ex: “my-repo” or “other-user/my-repo”
• description => repo description
• homepage => homepage url
• public => 1 for public, 0 for private

monkeypatch git

I’ll use a script…

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'json'
require 'rest-client'

USER = "mmm"
TOKEN = "XXXXXXXX"
URL = "https://github.com/api/v2/json/repos/create"

def usage 
  puts <<-EOS
    usage: #{$0} <name> [<description>] [<homepage>] [<public>]
    where:
      name => name of the repository
      description => repo description
      homepage => homepage url
      public => 1 for public, 0 for private
  EOS
  exit 1
end
ARGV.size > 0 || usage

params = {
  "login" => USER,
  "token" => TOKEN,
  "name" => ARGV[0],
  "description" => ARGV[1] || "",
  "homepage" => ARGV[2] || "",
  "public" => ARGV[3] || "1",
}

puts "creating repo: #{params.to_json}"

response = RestClient.post URL, params

puts response.body

I’ll call it git-create and put it in my path at ~/bin. Notice that git even picks it up as a builtin so I can

git create myrepo "my repo description"

and it just works…