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Troubleshooting

Learn how to resolve the most common problems people encounter in the REST API.

If you're encountering some oddities in the API, here's a list of resolutions to some of the problems you may be experiencing.

404 error for an existing repository

Typically, we send a 404 error when your client isn't properly authenticated. You might expect to see a 403 Forbidden in these cases. However, since we don't want to provide any information about private repositories, the API returns a 404 error instead.

To troubleshoot, ensure you're authenticating correctly, your OAuth access token has the required scopes, third-party application restrictions are not blocking access, and that the token has not expired or been revoked.

Not all results returned

Most API calls accessing a list of resources (e.g., users, issues, etc.) support pagination. If you're making requests and receiving an incomplete set of results, you're probably only seeing the first page. You'll need to request the remaining pages in order to get more results.

It's important to not try and guess the format of the pagination URL. Not every API call uses the same structure. Instead, extract the pagination information from the link header, which is returned with every request. For more information about pagination, see "Using pagination in the REST API."