In Github API, how can one distinguish a user from an organisation?

Question

Take the following Github URL: https://github.com/google

How can I determine whether google is a user or an organization?

I need to know to this for querying Github's graphql API in the correct way.

Answer 1

If you have the login (username) of the user/group, you can use organization & user to search respectively an organization & a user and check which of the 2 fields is not null :

{
  org: organization(login: "google") {
    name
    members {
      totalCount
    }
  }
  user: user(login: "google") {
    name
    login
  }
}

which gives :

{
  "data": {
    "org": {
      "name": "Google",
      "members": {
        "totalCount": 1677
      }
    },
    "user": null
  }
}

or using a variable for login input, try it in the explorer

For the Rest API v3, it's much simpler since it doesn't distinguish the user from the organization : https://developer.github.com/v3/users :

curl -s 'https://api.github.com/users/google' | jq -r '.type'

Organization

curl -s 'https://api.github.com/users/torvalds' | jq -r '.type'

User