poacher 0.1

Watches github.com for new public repositories

What is this?

This is a module that polls github.com for newly created repositories, allowing you to “grab” the URL (or any other information provided by the Github API) for all new public repositories as they are created.

Why?

For fun. It’s not something the Github API explicitly provides, and it’s a bit of a hack.

How does it work?

The Github API only allows you to fetch information about a specific repository by passing the repository ID, or of course the repository URL, however we’re interested in the ID in this case. There’s nothing really special about the repo ID, it’s just a number that gets incremented each time a repo is created. So the first ever repo has the ID “1”, and the 4,000th repo has the ID “4000”, etc.

This means we can determine the latest repo ID with a little brute force. Requests for a non-existent ID (or a private repo that your account cannot access) will fail, so with a simple binary search we can determine the highest repo ID currently in use, with a fairly small number of steps. Once we have this reference point, we can poll continuously for the next repo ID to be in use, and in this way “watch” the stream of new repos as they are being created.

Casual command-line usage

An example command-line program using poacher, poacher-monitor is provided with this package. poacher-monitor will print the clone URLs of new public repositories on github.com as they are created. Basic usage looks like this;

poacher-monitor

poacher-monitor has several comman-line options. To see a full description of all options, run poacher-monitor -h

Installation

Install using pip:

pip install poacher

Documentation

Full documentation for poacher Python API is here https://poacher.readthedocs.io