Request GET from API returns an empty JSON array

GitHub Ecosystem
#1

I’ve been having a problem in getting all contributor commit activity statistics from the GitHub REST API. In a workflow, I run this following script:

run: |
          curl --request GET \
          --url https://api.github.com/repos/${{ github.repository }}/stats/contributors \
          --header 'authorization: Bearer ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}' \
          --header 'content-type: application/json' > contribute.json

No run errors here, but when I write this to a JSON file, it only contains an empty JSON array:

{

}

Does anyone know the problem of why it is outputting an empty JSON file? This is a private repository if it helps with finding the problem. Thanks in advance!

#2

:wave: @kkarp9: an empty JSON array is returned if there are no contributors beyond the initial committer. Here’s an example public repository showcasing this behavior:

Does this help explain what you’re seeing? :thought_balloon:

#3

Thank you for reaching out on this. Yes, I do have contributors. I verified it on my repos. An update to this issue is that for some reason when I run the workflow to request GitHub API from other branches that I have, it returns the JSON array of all contributors. Only in the master branch I get the empty JSON array. Any intake on this?

#4

francisfuzz We’re seeing this as well with the contributors API! We have GH Enterprise Cloud and internal repos.

It seems that if the API sits for a while it will return an empty response and a 202, but if you immediately hit it again you’ll get a 200 with the expected response data. I have recreated this issue over the course of a few days now.

https://api.github.com/repos/{ORG}/{REPO}/stats/contributors

  • When the status returns a 202 Accepted the response is empty.
  • When the status returns a 200 Ok the response is complete

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