GitHub URL Hacks
Posted on July 11, 2021 • 2 minutes • 415 words
GitHub’s UI has improved a lot over the years but sometimes you just need quick access without clicking. Here are a few GitHub URL tips to get you data you want faster. One cool thing is all of these tips give raw text output so they work great with curl and other CLI tools.
Public SSH keys
If you want to get a users public ssh keys you can add .keys to the end of their user profile URL. Here’s mine.
https://github.com/rothgar.keys
Profile image
If you want to get a user’s profile picture you can add .png to the end of their user profile URL.
https://github.com/rothgar.png
Public GPG keys
If you want to get gpg public keys you can add .gpg to the end of their user profile URL. I don’t actually have any gpg keys so you can see what it looks like if a user doesn’t have them with my profile.
https://github.com/rothgar.gpg
RSS feeds
There are lots of different feeds you can subscribe to.
Repo commits
https://github.com/$USER/$REPO/commits.atom
Repo releases
https://github.com/$USER/$REPO/releases.atom
Repo tags
https://github.com/$USER/$REPO/tags.atom
User feeds
Public RSS feed will show public user activity. Repo stars, releases, etc.
https://github.com/rothgar.atom
There’s also a private user feed which is great if you don’t log into GitHub often.
It requires you to click in the UI, but I still find it incredibly useful. Log in to your account and on your dashboard scroll all the way to the bottom and click “Subscribe to your news feed”. This will generate a private token automatically and send you to https://github.com/$USER.private.atom?token=...
You can plug this directly into an RSS reader and it’ll include everything that normally shows up on your private dashboard feed. Repos and users you follow, project releases, and more.
Security advisories
This is a public RSS feed for GitHub security advisories.
https://github.com/security-advisories.atom
Global timeline
Diffs
You can diff branches in a repo by adding /compare/[fork-user:]$BRANCH...$BRANCH to the end of a repo url.
If you want to compare a dev branch to the main branch for my bashScheduler you can check out.
https://github.com/rothgar/bashScheduler/compare/main...dev
If you had a fork of the repo you could add your username before main like this.
https://github.com/rothgar/bashScheduler/compare/$USER:main...dev
The cool thing is you can get a raw patch or diff output using the same url and adding .patch and .diff to the end.
https://github.com/rothgar/bashScheduler/compare/main...dev.patch
https://github.com/rothgar/bashScheduler/compare/main...dev.diff
If I missed any cool URL tricks please let me know on Twitter . You can find a ton of other cool GitHub tricks in this github-cheat-sheet repo .