Since you mentioned you are a beginner python programmer, I would suggest you to try to use the JSON API without any Github library first. It really isn't that difficult and it will help you a lot later in your programming life since same approach can be applied to any JSON API. Especially if it seems that trying out libraries will take days.

I'm not saying that some library isn't easier to use, I'm just saying the small extra effort to use the API directly might be worth it in the long run. At least it will help you understand why some of those libraries seem "unintuitive" (as you said).

Simple example to fetch creation time of django repository:

import requests
import json
r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/repos/django/django')
if(r.ok):
    repoItem = json.loads(r.text or r.content)
    print "Django repository created: " + repoItem['created_at']

This is using the popular requests library. In your code you'll naturally need to handle the error cases too.

If you need access with authentication it will be a bit more complex.

Answer from Lycha on Stack Overflow
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but i’ll look into alternatives, thanks a lot, guys · Liuyang Wan · @sfdye · PyGithub works well for that, but seems like you can only commit one file at a time you can’t call upload_file multiple times? Antonio Vilches · @avilchess · Hi Guys, I need to hit the GitHub API, so I´m considerig using this python library for extracting the last TAG from a public github repository.
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/learningpython › need help with pygithub documentation
r/learningpython on Reddit: Need help with PyGithub Documentation
December 15, 2025 -

I'm new to python and have been ramping up recently. The information at realpython.com is invaluable!

I'm trying to make some GitHub integrations and am using the PyGithub api/package/module (I'm unsure of the nomenclature but you get it). I've not yet had too much experience with python api docs, but this seems a bit difficult to parse.

I'm able to eek by using the lsp to help describe the methods/signatures and attribs. But I do need help understanding how to read this documentation. I see some information using the examples, but it's leading to more questions than answers.

Edit: Specifically, I am having difficulty understanding how the chain of actions work. It is not very clear what methods return what, nor is it clear which methods take input, and what input it is.

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I figured it out. It's very not obvious, which is frustrating, but it makes more sense now. The PyGithub api is 1:1 with the github api spec. This means, that the inputs and outputs are also 1:1. The PyGithub API page is to help show you the mapping between the github api and it's own api. For example: The docs show: /repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/runs/{run_id} GET: github.Repository.Repository.get_workflow_run() or github.Repository.RepositorySearchResult.get_workflow_run() DELETE: github.WorkflowRun.WorkflowRun.delete() and that's it. While it doesn't specify the inputs as run_id within the API documentation, it does show it as required in the GitHub API docs . Parameters for "Get a workflow run" Name, Type, Description | accept string Setting to application/vnd.github+json is recommended. Name, Type, Description | owner string Required The account owner of the repository. The name is not case sensitive. | repo string Required The name of the repository without the .git extension. The name is not case sensitive. | run_id integer Required The unique identifier of the workflow run. Name, Type, Description | exclude_pull_requests boolean If true pull requests are omitted from the response (empty array). Default: false (The formatting is weird, but the sections are "Headers", "Path Parameters", "Query Parameters" respectively. ) That means the code would look like: from github import Github, Auth, UnknownObjectException def get_workflow_run(): """Gets details for a given workflow run""" github_client = Github(auth=Auth.Token("GITHUB_TOKEN")) run_id=1234 repo_name="owner/repo" repo = None run = None try: repo = github_client.get_repo(repo_name) run = repo.get_workflow_run(run_id) except UnknownObjectException: return {"error": f"Workflow run with id {run_id} not found in repository {repo_name}"} return marshal_run(run, verbose=True) (I am still learning, excuse the code if it's not very pythonic. This isn't the actual function I'm going with, it's just a representation for this post.)
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