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:

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

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.