Get repository content

Gets the contents of a file or directory in a repository. Specify the file path or directory in :path. If you omit
:path, you will receive the contents of the repository's root directory. See the description below regarding what the API response includes for directories.

Files and symlinks support a custom media type for
retrieving the raw content or rendered HTML (when supported). All content types support a custom media
type to ensure the content is returned in a consistent
object format.

Notes:

To get a repository's contents recursively, you can recursively get the tree.

This API has an upper limit of 1,000 files for a directory. If you need to retrieve more files, use the Git Trees
API.

Download URLs expire and are meant to be used just once. To ensure the download URL does not expire, please use the contents API to obtain a fresh download URL for each download.

Size limits

If the requested file's size is:

1 MB or smaller: All features of this endpoint are supported.

Between 1-100 MB: Only the raw or object custom media types are supported. Both will work as normal, except that when using the object media type, the content field will be an empty string and the encoding field will be "none". To get the contents of these larger files, use the raw media type.

Greater than 100 MB: This endpoint is not supported.

If the content is a directory

The response will be an array of objects, one object for each item in the directory.
When listing the contents of a directory, submodules have their "type" specified as "file". Logically, the value
should be "submodule". This behavior exists in API v3 for backwards compatibility purposes.
In the next major version of the API, the type will be returned as "submodule".

If the content is a symlink

If the requested :path points to a symlink, and the symlink's target is a normal file in the repository, then the
API responds with the content of the file (in the format shown in the example. Otherwise, the API responds with an object
describing the symlink itself.

If the content is a submodule

The submodule_git_url identifies the location of the submodule repository, and the sha identifies a specific
commit within the submodule repository. Git uses the given URL when cloning the submodule repository, and checks out
the submodule at that specific commit.

If the submodule repository is not hosted on github.com, the Git URLs (git_url and _links["git"]) and the
github.com URLs (html_url and _links["html"]) will have null values.

[ { "_links": { "git": "http://example.com", "html": "http://example.com", "self": "http://example.com" }, "content": "string", "download_url": "http://example.com", "git_url": "http://example.com", "html_url": "http://example.com", "name": "string", "path": "string", "sha": "string", "size": 0, "type": "dir", "url": "http://example.com" } ]

Size limits

If the content is a directory

If the content is a symlink

If the content is a submodule

Request

Responses

Get repository content

Size limits#

If the content is a directory#

If the content is a symlink#

If the content is a submodule#

Request

Responses

Size limits

If the content is a directory

If the content is a symlink

If the content is a submodule