Pushing Files to GitHub Programmatically

Recently I had the opportunity to work with GitHub’s API again. This time I was particularily interested in the Repo Contents API. The goal was to be able to publish files from disk or embedded resource (read: stream) directly to a GitHub repo without having to clone the repo somewhere and then issue a git push.

The API seemed (as is always with case with the GitHub API) straightforward and had methods for creating and updating files. So I got to work…

TL;DR - show me the code/installation instructions

In my particular case, I was trying to pull embedded resources out of an assembly, push them to GitHub and then trigger our CI server to run a build and if successful, trigger a deployment.

To get started, I had to think of what would be ideal for me. I came to the conclusion that I needed:

an arbitrary array of bytes
the target owner/repo
a repo-relative path for where the bytes should be stored (file name)

The goal being code that looked like this:

	// get the api token from sonewhere...

	var service = new ContentService(token);
	var file = new DiskFile("Files/content_file.gif");
	var target = new FileTarget(owner, repo, file.Name);

	service.PushFile(file, target, "pushing file via GitHubPushLib");

view raw result.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

I needed to make sure that the app could both create and update a file, so I ended up with the following code:

	using System;
	using System.Collections.Generic;
	using System.Linq;
	using System.Text;

	namespace GitHubPushLib
	{
	public sealed class ContentService
	{
	private ContentRepo _repo;
	private string _authToken;

	public ContentService(string authToken)
	: this(authToken, new GitHubContentRepo())
	{
	}

	public ContentService(string authToken, ContentRepo repo = null)
	{
	Guard.AgainstNullOrEmpty("authToken", authToken);

	this._repo = repo;
	this._authToken = authToken;
	}

	public File PushFile(File file, FileTarget target, string message)
	{
	Guard.AgainstNull("file", file);
	Guard.AgainstNull("target", target);
	Guard.AgainstNullOrEmpty("message", message);

	var existingFile = this._repo.GetFile(this._authToken, target);

	if (existingFile != null)
	{
	// set the hash to the existing one...
	file.SHA = existingFile.SHA;
	}

	return existingFile == null ?
	this._repo.CreateFile(this._authToken, file, target, message) :
	this._repo.UpdateFile(this._authToken, file, target, message);
	}
	}
	}

view raw ContentService.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The Result

After only a few hours I had a fully tested implementation that I was able to use. I figured that other people might have the same need, so I packaged it up as a NuGet package.

Install-Package GitHubPushLib

If you’re interested, check out the code on GitHub. I’ve setup Travis CI and would love to see some pull requests!

The repo contains a sample app (with instructions) you can use to play around with.

Pushing Files to GitHub Programmatically

PUBLISHED ON OCT 7, 2013

The Result

TAGS: API, GITHUB, NUGET

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