Search in gist only

[CaledoniaProject]

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I'm using github search api to find relevant code or repo. But it works on repo only, how can I search gist only?

e.g by searching "CVE-2", I'm expecting to find https://gist.github.com/N3mes1s/d882ee7ca4ddcad150f94b7460508a32

[Thejas79]

GitHub does not provide a public Search API for Gists. To find Gists you have two practical options:

Scrape the Gist web search (https://gist.github.com/search?q=...) — quick and simple but unofficial and brittle.
Stack Overflow
+1

Index public gists yourself by pulling /gists/public (paginated) and searching your local index — reliable but heavier.
github.apidog.io
+1

Below I show example commands / code for both approaches and the pros/cons so you can pick.

Option A — Quick (unofficial) — scrape the Gist search page

The Gist web UI supports queries like https://gist.github.com/search?q=CVE-2. You can request that URL and parse the HTML to extract matching gist links.

Example (Python + requests + BeautifulSoup):

Requires: pip install requests beautifulsoup4

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

q = "CVE-2"
url = f"https://gist.github.com/search?q={requests.utils.requote_uri(q)}"
resp = requests.get(url, headers={"User-Agent":"my-bot/1.0"})
resp.raise_for_status()

soup = BeautifulSoup(resp.text, "html.parser")

gist links on search results are anchors with href like //

links = []
for a in soup.select("a.link-to-gist, a[href^='https://gist.github.com/']"):
href = a.get("href")
if href and ("/" in href):
links.append(href if href.startswith("http") else "https://gist.github.com" + href)

print unique matches

for l in sorted(set(links)):
print(l)

Pros

Simple and fast to implement.

Finds the exact Gist web search results (same as what you see in a browser).
Gist

Cons

Unofficial — GitHub can change the HTML or block scraping.
Stack Overflow

May violate GitHub TOS if abused; pay attention to rate limits and politeness.
accept answer

[SheronVirochana]

you can’t use the GitHub Search API (v3) to search gists as you do repos — there is no “search gists” endpoint. Here’s more detail and some possible workarounds

[CaledoniaProject]

How do I submit a feature request to support this?