Note: Rate limits are only enabled for your instance if your site administrator has enabled them. Even if rate limits are disabled for your instance, you may still want to follow the best practices that are intended to help you avoid exceeding the rate limit. This can help reduce load on your servers.
Avoid polling
You should subscribe to webhook events instead of polling the API for data. This will help your integration stay within the API rate limit. For more information, see "Webhooks documentation."
Make authenticated requests
Authenticated requests have a higher primary rate limit than unauthenticated requests. To avoid exceeding the rate limit, you should make authenticated requests. For more information, see "Rate limits for the REST API."
Avoid concurrent requests
To avoid exceeding secondary rate limits, you should make requests serially instead of concurrently. To achieve this, you can implement a queue system for requests.
Pause between mutative requests
If you are making a large number of POST
, PATCH
, PUT
, or DELETE
requests, wait at least one second between each request. This will help you avoid secondary rate limits.
Handle rate limit errors appropriately
If you receive a rate limit error, you should stop making requests temporarily according to these guidelines:
- If the
retry-after
response header is present, you should not retry your request until after that many seconds has elapsed. - If the
x-ratelimit-remaining
header is0
, you should not make another request until after the time specified by thex-ratelimit-reset
header. Thex-ratelimit-reset
header is in UTC epoch seconds. - Otherwise, wait for at least one minute before retrying. If your request continues to fail due to a secondary rate limit, wait for an exponentially increasing amount of time between retries, and throw an error after a specific number of retries.
Continuing to make requests while you are rate limited may result in the banning of your integration.
Follow redirects
The GitHub Enterprise Server REST API uses HTTP redirection where appropriate. You should assume that any request may result in a redirection. Receiving an HTTP redirection is not an error, and you should follow the redirect.
A 301
status code indicates permanent redirection. You should repeat your request to the URL specified by the location
header. Additionally, you should update your code to use this URL for future requests.
A 302
or 307
status code indicates temporary redirection. You should repeat your request to the URL specified by the location
header. However, you should not update your code to use this URL for future requests.
Other redirection status codes may be used in accordance with HTTP specifications.
Do not manually parse URLs
Many API endpoints return URL values for fields in the response body. You should not try to parse these URLs or to predict the structure of future URLs. This can cause your integration to break if GitHub changes the structure of the URL in the future. Instead, you should look for a field that contains the information that you need. For example, the endpoint to create an issue returns an html_url
field with a value like https://github.com/octocat/Hello-World/issues/1347
and a number
field with a value like 1347
. If you need to know the number of the issue, use the number
field instead of parsing the html_url
field.
Similarly, you should not try to manually construct pagination queries. Instead, you should use the link headers to determine what pages of results you can request. For more information, see "Using pagination in the REST API."
Use conditional requests if appropriate
Most endpoints return an etag
header, and many endpoints return a last-modified
header. You can use the values of these headers to make conditional requests. If the response has not changed, you will receive a 304 Not Modified
response. Making a conditional request does not count against your primary rate limit if a 304
response is returned.
For example, if a previous request returned an etag
header value of 644b5b0155e6404a9cc4bd9d8b1ae730
, you can use the if-none-match
header in a future request:
curl http(s)://<em>HOSTNAME</em>/api/v3/meta --include --header 'if-none-match: "644b5b0155e6404a9cc4bd9d8b1ae730"'
For example, if a previous request returned a last-modified
header value of Wed, 25 Oct 2023 19:17:59 GMT
, you can use the if-modified-since
header in a future request:
curl http(s)://<em>HOSTNAME</em>/api/v3/repos/github/docs --include --header 'if-modified-since: Wed, 25 Oct 2023 19:17:59 GMT'
Do not ignore errors
You should not ignore repeated 4xx
and 5xx
error codes. Instead, you should ensure that you are correctly interacting with the API. For example, if an endpoint requests a string and you are passing it a numeric value, you will receive a validation error. Similarly, attempting to access an unauthorized or nonexistent endpoint will result in a 4xx
error.
Intentionally ignoring repeated validation errors may result in the suspension of your app for abuse.