Question

Basically, I’d like to gather a list of links to github repos, and be able to flick through a list if readmes. Anyone know of anything that does this?

Answer 1

You can use GitHub’s Web API.

I’ll demonstrate with the Spoon-Knife repo:

First, you make a request to get the readme file(ofcourse, replace octocat/Spoon-Knife with the username&reponame you need):

$ curl "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Spoon-Knife/readme"
{
  "type": "file",
  "html_url": "https://github.com/octocat/Spoon-Knife/blob/master/README",
  "_links": {
    "html": "https://github.com/octocat/Spoon-Knife/blob/master/README",
    "git": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Spoon-Knife/git/blobs/c8f68c2fd5a340b5ec89ada61984254e31c6785d",
    "self": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Spoon-Knife/contents/README"
  },
  "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Spoon-Knife/contents/README",
  "path": "README",
  "git_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Spoon-Knife/git/blobs/c8f68c2fd5a340b5ec89ada61984254e31c6785d",
  "content": "QWxsIHRoYXQncyBtaXNzaW5nIGlzIHRoZSBmb3JrLiBIZWgu\n",
  "sha": "c8f68c2fd5a340b5ec89ada61984254e31c6785d",
  "encoding": "base64",
  "size": 36,
  "name": "README"
}

Notice the html_url field – that’s the HTML link to the file in the GitHub Web-GUI display. But since you only want the contents of the file, you’ll need to change blob to raw:

$ curl "https://raw.github.com/octocat/Spoon-Knife/master/README"
All that's missing is the fork. Heh.

Ofcourse, you would probably want to use the HTTP facilities of whatever programming language you are using instead of curl to query the GitHub server.

EDIT

Instead of making additional GET request, you can decode the content field using a base64 decoder:

$ echo QWxsIHRoYXQncyBtaXNzaW5nIGlzIHRoZSBmb3JrLiBIZWgu | base64 --decode
All that's missing is the fork. Heh.