How do I authenticate against GitHub using an API key?

Question

I am trying to use the GitHub Javascript API but am unable to authenticate using my API key. The API Docs say I can use:

{
  username: 'my-username',
  password: 'my-password'
  // , token: 'or an optional oAuth token'
}

But I'd like to use my API Key instead, much like I can do with curl from the command line. (for example)

curl --user "$user:$api_key" --include --request DELETE "https://api.github.com/repos/$user/$repo/labels/enhancement"

I've tried using my API Key as the token but that doesn't work.

Is use of the API Key to access GitHub via the Github API wrapper not supported? That would be weird.

Dave Sag · Accepted Answer · 2017-01-23 05:13:31Z

Okay so it turns out what I was calling my API Key is the same thing as the personal access token and I was just being confused because

import GitHub from 'github-api'

const gh = new GitHub({
    token: 'MY-PERSONAL-ACCESS-TOKEN-OBTAINED-FROM-github.com/settings/tokens' // real token redacted obviously
})

const me = gh.getUser()
console.log('me', me)

was spitting out

me User {
  __apiBase: 'https://api.github.com',
  __auth: 
   { token: '970818535b841883ff2735fe127d289032970389',
     username: undefined,
     password: undefined },
  __AcceptHeader: 'v3',
  __authorizationHeader: 'token MY-PERSONAL-ACCESS-TOKEN-OBTAINED-FROM-github.com/settings/tokens',
  __user: undefined }

and I was interpreting __user: undefined to mean that the authentication was not working.

However if I actually try then adding

me.listNotifications().then(
    notifications => console.log('notifications', notifications),
    err => console.log('error', err)
).catch(err => console.log('fatal', err))

tadah it works.

If I throw in a rubbish token new GitHub doesn't complain (because presumably it's not actually going off to GitHub to do the auth at that point as I first thought), but the .listNotifications() does get rejected with a 401 error.

So, that's resolved my confusion.

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