While getting to know the very sweet Github Api v3, I ran into a little bug when trying to page though results coming back from the service. While it was frustrating at the time, Github’s support and resolution blew me out of the water.

For a new in-house project, we would like to be able to grab the commit messages for a number of our repositories that live in Github. Using the octokit gem with the auto_traversal option turned on, this is trivially easy. Because of a bug in the Github api, when the gem tried to page though the results, the link it got for the next page was always the same. This caused an infinite loops of http requests, and me to try to pull all of my hair out.

Once I threw a few Pry bindings into the project and was able to track the issue, I was able to easily hunt down Github’s support for issues with the API (it was right on the docs page for the API). All that was required to get a fix deployed for the issue was a quick email with steps to reproduce the bugs and less than 24 hours of patience!

The fact that the Github crew was able to submit a fix to their live service before I could submit a pull request to octokit with a workaround reminds me why they stand out in my mind as a great web app. Not only is their site feature rich and easy to use, but they’ve got a great team backing the technology up. That’s why we at Highgroove trust them with our code and why we recommend them to clients.