Using GitHub API via PowerShell Module

[jtgorman]

There's a very handy PowerShell Module for GitHub, PowerShellForGitHub. It lets you work with the GitHub API in a more "powershellesque" fashion.

The one shortcoming so far is that it's not a complete implementation of the api, with the notable exception of missing invites. The the github api is pretty straightforward and I've used a PowerShell script that re-uses the lower-level function that calls out to the api directly....

Following snippet based off of InviteAllFromOrg.ps1. $invitee here has some information about a $user, including their github login, id (numeric id), and team ids for the target organization.

$hashBody = @{}
$hashBody['invitee_id'] = $invitee.id
$hashBody['team_ids'] = @($invitee.TeamNames | %{ $target_org_team_ids[ $_ ] })

$body = (ConvertTo-Json -InputObject $hashBody)

$params = @{
'Method' = 'Post'
'UriFragment' = "orgs/uiuclib-repo-archive/invitations"
'Body' = $body
}

if( -not $DryRun ) {
try {
$invite_results = Invoke-GHRestMethod @params
Write-Output $invite_results
}
catch {
Write-Output "Request failed on $($invitee.login): $PSItem"
}

[jtgorman]

One note, the above uses a user's numeric id in github. In most circumstances, it probably makes more sense to invite by email address. That can be done using "email", see the api docs on creating an organization invite for more info.

[jtgorman]

Also, be careful, you can run into paging issues with this approach. Will add some info when I get a chance on how to deal with paging, but there's some docs that seem like a good starting place

[jtgorman]

One more tip/warning - turns out for Get-GitHubRepository, the OwnerName isn't necessarily the same as the OrganizationName. I'm still learning the internals of the api and GitHub, but in most other cases it seems like only one or the other is used, but for this it matters. If you want a list of all repositories in an Organization, use OrganizationName. (I suspect OwnerName here filters to public repositories, but not sure).

[edthedev]

As previously discussed, I have added my helper scripts for converting GitHub API results into Markdown lists.
uillinois-community/powershell-scripts#8

These do the following nice things:

Capture work completed in the last sprint.
Show-GHClosed shows closed GitHub issues updated in the last 14 days.

Look for work that might be slipping off of my radar.
Show-GHMine shows open GitHub issues assigned to $env:GITHUB_USERNAME with
no activity in the last 24 hours.

List issues that need to be sized by the team.
Get/Show-GHUnsized shows open issues with no labels from the set 'XS', 'S', 'M',
'L', 'XL'. 'XXL' is intentionally included in the output as it needs resized.

Show-GHToDiscuss shows open issues with the label 'DiscussAtStandUp'.

Show-GHNoMilestone shows issues that are not part of any GitHub milestone.

These commands each have a matching 'Get-' command in case you want to work with
that data set in PowerShell.

[edthedev]

After some months working with GitHub through PowerShell, I've learned some interesting things about the GitHub API and the GitHub CLI, and when to use each. To that end, I separated my previous PowerShell into two separate modules - one that does tasks that require the API, and another that does tasks that require GitHub CLI. The two tools feel a bit...independent...right now.

If you're using them and interacting entirely through PowerShell, you can just mix the two libraries in scripts, as needed, as long as you don't mind first provisioning both types of connections in your shell environment, first.