GitHub API find all commits by user ID with timestamp

Question

Is there an efficient way to find all recent commits by a specific user across all public repos?

I am currently use /events/public and filtering out those event.type === "PushEvent". However this is not very efficient because

• The commits in the PushEvent does not have timestamp, which means I need additional requests to fetch their timestamps through commits[][url].
• There is a limit of 60 requests/hour which gets quickly used up because I need to fetch timestamp of each commit.

Is there any better way to do this?

Answer 1

No unfortunately there is no better way to retrieve commits for the user. However there is a workaround for the rate limit:

Documentation says

For requests using Basic Authentication or OAuth, you can make up to 5,000 requests per hour. For unauthenticated requests, the rate limit allows you to make up to 60 requests per hour.

You can generate an access token and use it as an OAuth token.

How to use token

If you're going to use Basic Authentication you need to add new header

Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpPcGVuU2VzYW1l

where the string after Basic is a Base64 encoded string of

your_user_name:your_token

If you're using curl

curl -u username:token https://api.github.com/user

or

curl https://username:token@api.github.com/