Get a repository's commits along with changed patches and the url to changed files using GraphQL v4 #24496

armsp · 2018-11-05T14:21:52Z

armsp
Nov 5, 2018

I am able to get the list of commits (with fields like commit messages, oid, commit url etc) along with the number of changedFiles, made in a repository on the master branch.
However I am not able to figure out how to get any information about the changes themselves and the files that were changed.

In v3 of the REST API, the information about the changes were contained in files->patch, and files -> raw_url or blob_url gave info about the original file itself at that stage.

Q) In v4 of GitHub’s API using GraphQL how do I get the corresponding information?

This is the query I am stuck with right now (showing only 1 commit for brevity) -

query {
  rateLimit{
    cost
    remaining
  }
  repository(owner: "elastic", name: "elasticsearch") {
    name
    defaultBranchRef {
      name
      target {
        ... on Commit {
          history(first:1){
            nodes{
              message
              changedFiles
              id
              oid
              treeUrl
              url
              tree{
                oid
              }
            }
            pageInfo{
              hasNextPage
              startCursor
              endCursor
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Output:

{
  "data": {
    "rateLimit": {
      "cost": 1,
      "remaining": 4999
    },
    "repository": {
      "name": "elasticsearch",
      "defaultBranchRef": {
        "name": "master",
        "target": {
          "history": {
            "nodes": [
              {
                "message": "Small corrections to HLRC doc for _termvectors (#35221)\n\nRelates to #33447",
                "changedFiles": 2,
                "id": "MDY6Q29tbWl0NTA3Nzc1OmEyYzIyYWQ3YWViMGY4ZDUxNDg2NzdkZDcyMjJhZDQzYWZlZTlhMTc=",
                "oid": "a2c22ad7aeb0f8d5148677dd7222ad43afee9a17",
                "treeUrl": "https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/tree/a2c22ad7aeb0f8d5148677dd7222ad43afee9a17",
                "url": "https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/commit/a2c22ad7aeb0f8d5148677dd7222ad43afee9a17",
                "tree": {
                  "oid": "4f5f11e0e55aeafc4677800959232726a2cd787c"
                }
              }
            ],
            "pageInfo": {
              "hasNextPage": true,
              "startCursor": "a2c22ad7aeb0f8d5148677dd7222ad43afee9a17 0",
              "endCursor": "a2c22ad7aeb0f8d5148677dd7222ad43afee9a17 0"
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

I tried many ways to somehow extract information about the patches however I failed all the time. I have started learning about GraphQL just a couple of days ago so I don’t have any experience with it.

I was thinking if there is a corresponding object for patch(that shows the changes in REST API v3) in GraphQL API then I might be able to reverse engineer my way through it, howver the docs have been very cryptic.

Any guidance would be much appreciated.

Answered by francisfuzz

Jul 31, 2020

mljrg:

can’t the technical team include the information about file changes, i.e., the paths of added, modified, deleted, and renamed files, in GraphQL’s Commit object?

This can save a lot of network resources when compared to getting the same information via the Rest API Get a single commit , which always sends patches over the network …

MaxAst:

+1 on needing this functionality. I need to get a list of file extensions per commit

👋 @mljrg: These are great points to bring up and something our product team would be interested in hearing more about. The best place to share product feedback and feature requests is through our official product feedback form.

wbuiejr:

To advertise…

View full answer

AndreaGriffiths11 · 2018-11-07T15:39:13Z

AndreaGriffiths11
Nov 7, 2018

Hi @armsp,

Thank you for being here! We don’t yet support that in the GraphQL API. There has been a schema request for it. I’ll update this post when we get new info about a ship.

Best,

Andrea

0 replies

platy · 2019-04-12T08:07:25Z

platy
Apr 12, 2019

Hi Andrea,

should we still be using v3 for getting information about the changes in a commit? I think a comment on the v4 Commit object documentation to say that would be really helpful.

Thanks,

Mike

0 replies

AndreaGriffiths11 · 2019-04-13T17:33:26Z

AndreaGriffiths11
Apr 13, 2019

You are correct @platy and thank you for the feedback I’ll pass it along to the documentation team. Thanks again!

0 replies

jamieoneill · 2019-07-02T09:45:54Z

jamieoneill
Jul 2, 2019

any news on this? i still dont see it documented

Thanks

0 replies

bobbytreed · 2019-12-18T18:19:40Z

bobbytreed
Dec 18, 2019

Still looking for this as well.

0 replies

lots0logs · 2020-02-03T18:33:30Z

lots0logs
Feb 3, 2020

0 replies

mljrg · 2020-02-13T12:56:23Z

mljrg
Feb 13, 2020

Hi Andrea,

can’t the technical team include the information about file changes, i.e., the paths of added, modified, deleted, and renamed files, in GraphQL’s Commit object?

This can save a lot of network resources when compared to getting the same information via the Rest API Get a single commit , which always sends patches over the network …

Thanks

0 replies

wbuiejr · 2020-06-29T15:58:02Z

wbuiejr
Jun 29, 2020

To advertise GraphQL claiming it offers greater flexibility, and then not offer the flexibility in v3 does not give me warm fuzzy feelings.

Is it safe to assume that v3 will continue to be supported at least until everything I can do in v3 is possible in v4?

0 replies

pconrad · 2020-07-20T23:47:38Z

pconrad
Jul 20, 2020

Is it still the case that in v4 with GraphQL, that you cannot get a list of the files changed in a commit?

And if so, what’s the tl;dr on what you need to do using the v3 api to get around this limitation?

I am writing scripts to analyze commit behavior on student software engineering projects. I need to get a list of the files changed so that we can exclude certain commits that only touch documentation and not code.

0 replies

MaxAst · 2020-07-28T12:02:17Z

MaxAst
Jul 28, 2020

+1 on needing this functionality. I need to get a list of file extensions per commit

0 replies

francisfuzz · 2020-07-31T20:28:36Z

francisfuzz
Jul 31, 2020

mljrg:

can’t the technical team include the information about file changes, i.e., the paths of added, modified, deleted, and renamed files, in GraphQL’s Commit object?

This can save a lot of network resources when compared to getting the same information via the Rest API Get a single commit , which always sends patches over the network …

MaxAst:

+1 on needing this functionality. I need to get a list of file extensions per commit

👋 @mljrg: These are great points to bring up and something our product team would be interested in hearing more about. The best place to share product feedback and feature requests is through our official product feedback form.

wbuiejr:

To advertise GraphQL claiming it offers greater flexibility , and then not offer the flexibility in v3 does not give me warm fuzzy feelings.

Is it safe to assume that v3 will continue to be supported at least until everything I can do in v3 is possible in v4?

👋 @wbuiejr: Thanks for bringing up that point. I can see how that wording can come across and there’s definitely an opportunity for us to review the current presentation; this is something that our product team is open to hearing about as well.

Having feature parity between the GitHub REST API and the GraphQL is something that the API team is aware of, though I personally can’t speak if or when there will be an initiative to move that forward.

If it helps, we recently announced the GitHub public roadmap. This is the one place where anyone can learn about what features our team is working on, what stage they’re in, and when they’re expected to be released.

At this stage, we’re going to continue to support both the GitHub REST API and the GitHub GraphQL API.

pconrad:

Is it still the case that in v4 with GraphQL, that you cannot get a list of the files changed in a commit?

👋 @pconrad: The Commit object doesn’t expose a field that lists the files changed. However, it still exposes a changedFiles field indicating the number of changed files.

pconrad:

And if so, what’s the tl;dr on what you need to do using the v3 api to get around this limitation?

The REST API exposes an endpoint for fetching a single commit. The API responds with a JSON object with a files attribute listing all of the files changed. This endpoint also supports the diff and patch media types. Does this help?

pconrad:

I am writing scripts to analyze commit behavior on student software engineering projects. I need to get a list of the files changed so that we can exclude certain commits that only touch documentation and not code.

In addition to using the GitHub API to obtain this information, it might also be interesting to use Git directly. One approach is cloning the repository and periodically fetching those new commits and running a script that automatically compute the list of files changed per commit per author using a command like git diff-tree or git show (passing along the appropriate options).

1 reply

benreaves Jun 17, 2023

Cloning all repos and fetching all versions would be very inefficient with time and bandwidth but maybe avoid rate limit? Github must have a rate limit on the number of clones per hour, but I don't see an explicit limit

est · 2023-11-25T17:52:01Z

est
Nov 25, 2023

I think I hacked a way out.

Suppose you want to check how files under src were changed by who's commit

In this example, I check the latest 12 commits, for a depth of two folders max

{
  repository(owner: "my", name: "sweet_repo") {
    defaultBranchRef {
      target {
        ... on Commit {
          history(first: 12,path:"src/") {
            nodes {
              message
              oid
              file(path:"src/") {
		object{
                  ... on Tree{
                    entries{
                      path
                      object {
                        ... on Tree{
                          commitUrl
                          entries{
                            path
                          }
                        }
                      }
                    }
                  }
                }
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

After the result, parse the commitUrl using regex for the sha and compare with each Commit.oid

If you want to check more path depth, just nest object{ ... on Tree { entries like turtles all the way down. All glory to the useful invention of GraphQL!

It doesn't solve all problems but hey it work for me, and it saves tons of stupid N+1 requests.

0 replies

Provide feedback

Saved searches

Use saved searches to filter your results more quickly

GitHub Community

Get a repository's commits along with changed patches and the url to changed files using GraphQL v4 #24496

{{title}}

Replies: 12 comments 1 reply

{{title}}

{{title}}

{{title}}

{{title}}

{{title}}

{{title}}

{{title}}

{{title}}

{{title}}

{{title}}

{{title}}

{{title}}

{{title}}

{{editor}}'s edit

{{editor}}'s edit

Select a reply

Navigation Menu

Get a repository's commits along with changed patches and the url to changed files using GraphQL v4 #24496

Replies: 12 comments · 1 reply

Replies: 12 comments 1 reply