probot/docs/github-api.md

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Interacting with GitHub

Probot uses GitHub Apps. An app is a first-class actor on GitHub, like a user (e.g. @defunkt) or an organization (e.g. @github). The app is given access to a repository or repositories by being "installed" on a user or organization account and can perform actions through the API like commenting on an issue or creating a status.

context.github is an authenticated GitHub client that can be used to make API calls. It is an instance of the @octokit/rest Node.js module, which wraps the GitHub REST API and allows you to do almost anything programmatically that you can do through a web browser.

Here is an example of an autoresponder app that comments on opened issues:

module.exports = robot => {
  robot.on('issues.opened', async context => {
    // `context` extracts information from the event, which can be passed to
    // GitHub API calls. This will return:
    //   {owner: 'yourname', repo: 'yourrepo', number: 123, body: 'Hello World!}
    const params = context.issue({body: 'Hello World!'})

    // Post a comment on the issue
    return context.github.issues.createComment(params)
  })
}

See the full API docs to see all the ways you can interact with GitHub. Some API endpoints are not available on GitHub Apps yet, so check which ones are available first.

GitHub Enterprise

If you want to run a Probot App against a GitHub Enterprise instance, you'll need to set the GHE_HOST environment variable.

GHE_HOST=fake.github-enterprise.com

GitHub Apps are enabled in GitHub Enterprise 2.12 as an early access technical preview.