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I am a collaborator for a private repository and able to edit, push code, create issues, close issues, etc on it. I am trying to create a report of issues open and closed on the repository. To achieve this I needed to get issues based on time interval and label. I found that the GitHub search API will be useful for me.

I started out by creating a token (PAT) giving it the whole repo scope scope screenshot

Then to test the API I hit the below URL with the token

https://api.github.com/search/issues?q=repo:orgname/reponame

I am able to get the results.

Then I tried to narrow down by adding is:issue and is:closed qualifier using the same token

https://api.github.com/search/issues?q=repo:orgname/reponame+is:issue+is:closed

I got the below response

{
  "message": "Validation Failed",
  "errors": [
    {
      "message": "The listed users and repositories cannot be searched either because the resources do not exist or you do not have permission to view them.",
      "resource": "Search",
      "field": "q",
      "code": "invalid"
    }
  ],
  "documentation_url": "https://docs.github.com/v3/search/"
}

The issues are present and I can search it on Github website, but couldn't via github search api. I am able to apply a repo qualifier but couldn't add any other qualifiers.

What am I missing here?

nak
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1 Answers1

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There's two things I've found that can cause this.

In your case it's likely permissions since your encoding appears to be fine.

Searching specifically for PRs or Issues on private repos requires 'content' permissions (this is incorrectly documented in the GitHub docs as requiring metadata permissions). If a user has no public repos but they do have private ones then you get a permission error like the above, rather than the empty response that you get if they have no repos of any kind or only public repos but no matching results.

The other thing I've found that causes this is incorrect encoding of the query. An easy error to make there (from experience) is having the + sign in the query and then encoding it. This encodes the + as %3A whereas what you want is a space between each query term. The space is then encoded as +. Making this encoding mistake will also result in the same permission/not found error.

I appreciate this is probably a little late for you, but hopefully it helps others.

Tom Manterfield
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