BRbrasic·May 7, 2022
That's completely fair. I think the analogy to SQL as an API is very apt. No one would argue that full SQL access isn't a powerful API but it takes some legwork to understand the schema and write queries to get the data you need.
There's a divide between at least two types of persona here. On one side is integrators building products and features on top of the GitHub API. For these people GraphQL is arguably superior since the learning curve is manageable and in exchange for scaling it you can make an extremely specific query that returns your product's exact data requirements. The cost of writing this query is amortized over the lifetime of your integration.
On the other side are e.g. users automating some part of their GitHub workflow to save themselves time. I can see how the REST API feels like a better choice here, it's certainly
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simpler to get started with.
For what it's worth, here[0] is an example of using the `gh` CLI's graphql feature to print a list of all repository URLs for a given organization by login, sorted in a relatively complicated way. It's more verbose than doing this with the REST API but significantly more flexible. This could just as easily be done with curl but as others have pointed out, pagination requires a minimal level of logic to implement, so it's more convenient to use an existing helper. This output gets flushed 10 lines at a time as pages come in, making it suitable to compose with other commands using pipes.
$ gh api graphql --paginate -f query='
query($endCursor: String) {
organization(login: "rails") {
repositories(first: 10, after: $endCursor,
orderBy: { field: STARGAZERS, direction: DESC }
) {
nodes {
url
stargazers {
totalCount
}
}
pageInfo { endCursor hasNextPage } # needed for auto-pagination
}
}
}' -q '.data.organization.repositories.nodes.[]'
# output follows
{"stargazers":{"totalCount":50643},"url":"https://github.com/rails/rails"}
{"stargazers":{"totalCount":5298},"url":"https://github.com/rails/webpacker"}
{"stargazers":{"totalCount":4849},"url":"https://github.com/rails/thor"}
{"stargazers":{"totalCount":4075},"url":"https://github.com/rails/jbuilder"}
# snip
{"stargazers":{"totalCount":3},"url":"https://github.com/rails/hide_action"}
{"stargazers":{"totalCount":2},"url":"https://github.com/rails/gem-buildkite-config"}
{"stargazers":{"totalCount":2},"url":"https://github.com/rails/sqlite2_adapter"}
{"stargazers":{"totalCount":1},"url":"https://github.com/rails/fcgi_handler"}
[0]: https://gist.github.com/brasic/14222db7b3f5873b84820477cca27...