Search repositories

Note: The topics property for repositories on GitHub Enterprise is currently available for developers to preview. To view the topics property in calls that return repository results, you must provide a custom media type in the Accept header:

application/vnd.github.mercy-preview+json

Warning: The API may change without advance notice during the preview period. Preview features are not supported for production use. If you experience any issues, contact your GitHub Enterprise site administrator.

Find repositories via various criteria. This method returns up to 100 results per page.

When searching for repositories, you can get text match metadata for the name and description fields when you pass the text-match media type. For more details about how to receive highlighted search results, see Text match metadata.

GET /search/repositories

Parameters

Name	Type	Description
`q`	`string`	Required. The query contains one or more search keywords and qualifiers. Qualifiers allow you to limit your search to specific areas of GitHub. The REST API supports the same qualifiers as GitHub.com. To learn more about the format of the query, see Constructing a search query. See "Searching for repositories" for a detailed list of qualifiers.
`sort`	`string`	Sorts the results of your query by number of `stars`, `forks`, or `help-wanted-issues` or how recently the items were `updated`. Default: best match
`order`	`string`	Determines whether the first search result returned is the highest number of matches (`desc`) or lowest number of matches (`asc`). This parameter is ignored unless you provide `sort`. Default: `desc`

Example

Suppose you want to search for popular Tetris repositories written in Assembly. Your query might look like this.

curl http(s)://[hostname]/api/v3/search/repositories?q=tetris+language:assembly&sort=stars&order=desc

You can search for multiple topics by adding more topic: instances, and including the mercy-preview header. For example:

curl -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.mercy-preview+json" \
http(s)://[hostname]/api/v3/search/repositories?q=topic:ruby+topic:rails

In this request, we're searching for repositories with the word tetris in the name, the description, or the README. We're limiting the results to only find repositories where the primary language is Assembly. We're sorting by stars in descending order, so that the most popular repositories appear first in the search results.

Status: 200 OK
Link: <https://api.github.com/resource?page=2>; rel="next",
      <https://api.github.com/resource?page=5>; rel="last"
X-RateLimit-Limit: 20
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 19

{
  "total_count": 40,
  "incomplete_results": false,
  "items": [
    {
      "id": 3081286,
      "node_id": "MDEwOlJlcG9zaXRvcnkzMDgxMjg2",
      "name": "Tetris",
      "full_name": "dtrupenn/Tetris",
      "owner": {
        "login": "dtrupenn",
        "id": 872147,
        "node_id": "MDQ6VXNlcjg3MjE0Nw==",
        "avatar_url": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/e7956084e75f239de85d3a31bc172ace?d=https://a248.e.akamai.net/assets.github.com%2Fimages%2Fgravatars%2Fgravatar-user-420.png",
        "gravatar_id": "",
        "url": "https://api.github.com/users/dtrupenn",
        "received_events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/dtrupenn/received_events",
        "type": "User"
      },
      "private": false,
      "html_url": "https://github.com/dtrupenn/Tetris",
      "description": "A C implementation of Tetris using Pennsim through LC4",
      "fork": false,
      "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/dtrupenn/Tetris",
      "created_at": "2012-01-01T00:31:50Z",
      "updated_at": "2013-01-05T17:58:47Z",
      "pushed_at": "2012-01-01T00:37:02Z",
      "homepage": "",
      "size": 524,
      "stargazers_count": 1,
      "watchers_count": 1,
      "language": "Assembly",
      "forks_count": 0,
      "open_issues_count": 0,
      "master_branch": "master",
      "default_branch": "master",
      "score": 1.0
    }
  ]
}