Exceptions

PyGithub raises exceptions when the GitHub API responds with an error, rather than returning None or False. All exceptions raised because of a GitHub API error are (or derive from) github.GithubException.GithubException, so it is always safe to catch that type if you don’t need to distinguish between different failures:

from github import Github, GithubException

g = Github(auth=auth)

try:
    repo = g.get_repo("PyGithub/a-repo-that-does-not-exist")
except GithubException as e:
    print(f"Request failed with status {e.status}: {e.data}")

The most commonly encountered subclasses are:

• github.GithubException.UnknownObjectException — raised when the requested object does not exist (HTTP 404), for example get_repo, get_issue or get_user with an unknown name/number.

• github.GithubException.BadCredentialsException — raised when authentication fails or the token doesn’t have the required permissions (HTTP 401/403).

• github.GithubException.RateLimitExceededException — raised when you have hit the GitHub API rate limit (HTTP 403).

Since these all derive from GithubException, catch the most specific exception first if you want to handle cases differently:

from github import Github, GithubException, UnknownObjectException, RateLimitExceededException

g = Github(auth=auth)

try:
    repo = g.get_repo("PyGithub/PyGithub")
    issue = repo.get_issue(number=999999)
except UnknownObjectException:
    print("That repository or issue does not exist")
except RateLimitExceededException:
    print("You have exceeded the GitHub API rate limit, try again later")
except GithubException as e:
    print(f"Something else went wrong: {e.status} {e.data}")

Every GithubException carries the HTTP status code, the (decoded) data returned by the API, and the response headers, which is often what you need to build your own error message or retry logic:

try:
    repo.create_issue(title="")
except GithubException as e:
    # e.g. 422 {'message': 'Validation Failed', 'errors': [...]}
    print(e.status, e.data.get("message"))