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This version of GitHub Enterprise was discontinued on 2023-01-18. No patch releases will be made, even for critical security issues. For better performance, improved security, and new features, upgrade to the latest version of GitHub Enterprise. For help with the upgrade, contact GitHub Enterprise support.

Media types

In this article

Learn about media types for specifying the format of the data you want to consume.

Custom media types are used in the API to let consumers choose the format of the data they wish to receive. This is done by adding one or more of the following types to the Accept header when you make a request. Media types are specific to resources, allowing them to change independently and support formats that other resources don't.

All GitHub Enterprise Server media types look like this:

application/vnd.github.param[+json]

The most basic media types the API supports are:

application/vnd.github+json
application/json

Note: In the past, we recommended including v3 in your Accept header. This is no longer required and will have no impact on your API requests.

If you're specifying a property (such as full/raw/etc defined below), put it after github:

application/vnd.github.raw+json

Comment body properties

The body of a comment can be written in GitHub Flavored Markdown. The APIs to manage issues, issue comments, pull request comments, and gist comments all accept these same media types:

Raw

application/vnd.github.raw+json

Return the raw markdown body. Response will include body. This is the default if you do not pass any specific media type.

Text

application/vnd.github.text+json

Return a text only representation of the markdown body. Response will include body_text.

HTML

application/vnd.github.html+json

Return HTML rendered from the body's markdown. Response will include body_html.

Full

application/vnd.github.full+json

Return raw, text and HTML representations. Response will include body, body_text, and body_html:

Git blob properties

The following media types are allowed when getting a blob:

JSON

application/vnd.github+json
application/json

Return JSON representation of the blob with content as a base64 encoded string. This is the default if nothing is passed.

Raw

application/vnd.github.raw

Return the raw blob data.

Commits, commit comparison, and pull requests

The REST API to manage commits and pull requests support diff and patch formats:

diff

application/vnd.github.diff

patch

application/vnd.github.patch

sha

application/vnd.github.sha

Repository contents

Raw

application/vnd.github.raw

Return the raw contents of a file. This is the default if you do not pass any specific media type.

HTML

application/vnd.github.html

For markup files such as Markdown or AsciiDoc, you can retrieve the rendered HTML using the .html media type. Markup languages are rendered to HTML using our open-source Markup library.

Gists

Raw

application/vnd.github.raw

Return the raw contents of a gist. This is the default if you do not pass any specific media type.

base64

application/vnd.github.base64

The gist contents are base64-encoded before being sent out. This can be useful if your gist contains any invalid UTF-8 sequences.