Question

I am writing a simple widget that renders a canvas participation graph just like the one’s on github.

It uses the data at http://github.com/%5Buser%5D/%5Brepo%5D/graphs/participation

The widget works great and is basically done. The only problem I have is when I try to retrieve the json data from the above link via XHR (rather than just copying and pasting into the widget as I have been), I run into the same origin access control problem.

Is there any way I can access this information at all, either via XHR or some hidden github api feature?

Answer 1

I believe Github supports JSONP and CORS through its API. You could also setup a server-side proxy, through which XHR requests are made to a same-origin page which then does a server-side request to Github.

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To answer your question about the proxy, yes it’s very simple. I had actually done this exact thing about two years ago using Python and Tornado. I realize this isn’t PHP, but it reads close enough to english to give you the idea about how it works. This particular proxy was returning a raw gist.

# /proxy/gist
class GetGistHandler(BaseHandler):
    def get(self, id, filename):
        url = 'http://gist.github.com/raw/%s/%s' % (id, urllib.quote(filename))
        resp = urlfetch.fetch(url)
        self.finish(resp.content)

It can then be consumed with something along the lines of

$.ajax({
    url: '/proxy/gist',
    dataType: 'JSON',
    data: {
        id: $('#id').val(),
        filename: $('#filename').val()
    },
    success: function(json) {
        // ...
    }
});