How to use GitHub V3 API to get commit count for a repo?

Question

I am trying to count commits for many large github repos using the API, so I would like to avoid getting the entire list of commits (this way as an example:

Answer 1

I just made a little script to do this. It may not work with large repositories since it does not handle GitHub's rate limits. Also it requires the Python requests package.

#!/bin/env python3.4
import requests

GITHUB_API_BRANCHES = 'https://%(token)s@api.github.com/repos/%(namespace)s/%(repository)s/branches'
GUTHUB_API_COMMITS = 'https://%(token)s@api.github.com/repos/%(namespace)s/%(repository)s/commits?sha=%(sha)s&page=%(page)i'


def github_commit_counter(namespace, repository, access_token=''):
    commit_store = list()

    branches = requests.get(GITHUB_API_BRANCHES % {
        'token': access_token,
        'namespace': namespace,
        'repository': repository,
    }).json()

    print('Branch'.ljust(47), 'Commits')
    print('-' * 55)

    for branch in branches:
        page = 1
        branch_commits = 0

        while True:
            commits = requests.get(GUTHUB_API_COMMITS % {
                'token': access_token,
                'namespace': namespace,
                'repository': repository,
                'sha': branch['name'],
                'page': page
            }).json()

            page_commits = len(commits)

            for commit in commits:
                commit_store.append(commit['sha'])

            branch_commits += page_commits

            if page_commits == 0:
                break

            page += 1

        print(branch['name'].ljust(45), str(branch_commits).rjust(9))

    commit_store = set(commit_store)
    print('-' * 55)
    print('Total'.ljust(42), str(len(commit_store)).rjust(12))

# for private repositories, get your own token from
# https://github.com/settings/tokens
# github_commit_counter('github', 'gitignore', access_token='fnkr:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx')
github_commit_counter('github', 'gitignore')