When making authenticated requests to the GitHub API, applications often need to fetch the current user's repositories and organizations. In this guide, we'll explain how to reliably discover those resources.

To interact with the GitHub API, we'll be usingOctokit.rb. You can find the complete source code for this project in theplatform-samples repository.

Getting started

If you haven't already, you should read theBasics of Authentication guide before working through the examples below. The examples below assume that you haveregistered an OAuth app and that yourapplication has an OAuth token for a user.

Discover the repositories that your app can access for a user

In addition to having their own personal repositories, a user may be a collaborator on repositories owned by other users and organizations. Collectively, these are the repositories where the user has privileged access: either it's a private repository where the user has read or write access, or it's a public repository where the user has write access.

OAuth scopes andorganization application policies determine which of those repositories your app can access for a user. Use the workflow below to discover those repositories.

As always, first we'll requireGitHub's Octokit.rb Ruby library. Then we'll configure Octokit.rb to automatically handle pagination for us. For more information about pagination, seeUsing pagination in the REST API.

require'octokit'Octokit.auto_paginate =true

Next, we'll pass in our application'sOAuth token for a given user:

# !!! DO NOT EVER USE HARD-CODED VALUES IN A REAL APP !!!# Instead, set and test environment variables, like below.client =Octokit::Client.new:access_token =>ENV["OAUTH_ACCESS_TOKEN"]

Then, we're ready to fetch therepositories that our application can access for the user:

client.repositories.eachdo |repository|  full_name = repository[:full_name]  has_push_access = repository[:permissions][:push]  access_type =if has_push_access"write"else"read-only"end  puts"User has#{access_type} access to#{full_name}."end

Discover the organizations that your app can access for a user

Applications can perform all sorts of organization-related tasks for a user. To perform these tasks, the app needs anOAuth authorization with sufficient permission. For example, theread:org scope allows you tolist teams, and theuser scope lets youpublicize the user’s organization membership. Once a user has granted one or more of these scopes to your app, you're ready to fetch the user’s organizations.

Just as we did when discovering repositories above, we'll start by requiringGitHub's Octokit.rb Ruby library and configuring it to take care of pagination for us. For more information about pagination, seeUsing pagination in the REST API.

require'octokit'Octokit.auto_paginate =true

Next, we'll pass in our application'sOAuth token for a given user to initialize our API client:

# !!! DO NOT EVER USE HARD-CODED VALUES IN A REAL APP !!!# Instead, set and test environment variables, like below.client =Octokit::Client.new:access_token =>ENV["OAUTH_ACCESS_TOKEN"]

Then, we canlist the organizations that our application can access for the user:

client.organizations.eachdo |organization|  puts"User belongs to the#{organization[:login]} organization."end

Return all of the user's organization memberships

If you've read the docs from cover to cover, you may have noticed anAPI method for listing a user's public organization memberships. Most applications should avoid this API method. This method only returns the user's public organization memberships, not their private organization memberships.

As an application, you typically want all of the user's organizations that your app is authorized to access. The workflow above will give you exactly that.