Now that our app has a GitHub access token for the user, we can use it to make API requests. Let’s add a new section to our application that will run when the user clicks the “View Repos” link we created earlier.

Remember the apiRequest function we set up earlier? That’s where the access token is included in the HTTP request. The request this code will make will include the access token in the HTTP Authorization header, as illustrated in the example below.

GET /user/repos?sort=created&direction=desc HTTP/1.1
Host: api.github.com
Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json
User-Agent: https://example-app.com/
Authorization: Bearer e2f8c8e136c73b1e909bb1021b3b4c29

The code below will take the access token and use it in a request to list the user’s repositories. It will then output a list of repositories and link to each one.

if(isset($_GET['action']) && $_GET['action'] == 'repos') {
  // Find all repos created by the authenticated user
  $repos = apiRequest($apiURLBase.'user/repos?'.http_build_query([
    'sort' => 'created', 'direction' => 'desc'
  ]));

  echo '<ul>';
  foreach($repos as $repo)
    echo '<li><a href="' . $repo['html_url'] . '">'
      . $repo['name'] . '</a></li>';
  echo '</ul>';
}

That’s it! You can now use the access token to make API requests to any of the API endpoints on GitHub! You can see the full documentation of GitHub’s API at https://developer.github.com/v3/.

Download the Sample Code

You can download the complete sample code used in this example from GitHub at https://github.com/aaronpk/sample-oauth2-client.