octokit.js VS graphql.js

You can fetch different kinds of data with GitHub's API. There are two options: use the API directly or the Octokit.js library (this is the route GitHub recommends). I decided to use the API directly since the Octokit.js library included extra stuff I wouldn't need, which is an overkill for this use case.

The package @actions/github provides a hydrated Octokit.js client. Octokit.js is the SDK of GitHub and contains several subpackages like @octokit/rest and @octokit/graphql to interact with the REST or GraphQL API.

While sharing my project on Twitter, I got to know of Gregor Martynus, the maintainer of the JavaScript Octokit – GitHub's official JavaScript SDK and his project Octoherd. He tweeted a reply that it will be nice to have a GUI like Octokit-lite for Octoherd, and that sparked an inspiration for me ✨

I've also added an example using Octokit.js, GitHub's JS/TS client to the API.

In order for the project to be shipped as a service function, the node environment can not be used in any of the production code. Reviewing Probot source, one might see a dead end in that it uses require("dotenv").config(). However, its underlying framework, OctoKit does not come with any opinionated code in this regard.

Hey, I've been using Octokit in NestJS for interacting with GitHub's API and today I moved it out into a separate NPM package.

The package @actions/github provides a hydrated Octokit.js client. Octokit.js is the SDK of GitHub and contains several subpackages like @octokit/rest and @octokit/graphql to interact with the REST or GraphQL API.

The Github API provides a lot of fluidity in being able to access and mutate data within git programmatically. Github provides developers with both a traditional REST API and a more modern GraphQL API to interact with. However because of the increased flexibility of GraphQL APIs, there is some functionality that is available in GraphQL that is not available in REST.

I plan to build a Gatsby site, hosted on Gatsby Cloud that will source markdown files from the Gatsby GitHub Account docs folder. The markdown files within the release-notes will be sourced and then rendered to a single page. I'll be using @octokit/graphql and a few of Gatsby's data handling methods: sourceNodes and createNode.

If you don't need the Plugin API then using @octokit/request or @octokit/graphql directly is a good alternative.

Some companies provide an external module like GitHub's plugin-throttling package for their node clients. But often it's up to you to implement.