Increase to API Limits in GitHub Enterprise subscriptions

GitHub Enterprise accounts on github.com now enjoy higher hourly API rate limits for both GitHub Apps and OAuth Apps.

OAuth Apps were increased to 15,000 API calls per hour from the prior limit of 5,000 API calls per hour. GitHub Apps previously had a hard maximum of 12,500 API calls per hour, which was also raised to 15,000 per hour.

Higher limits apply to API requests tied to a GitHub Enterprise subscription, such as fetching issues or pull requests on a repository in an organization managed by a company. To receive the higher limit, the requests must come from a GitHub App or an OAuth App. GitHub Apps must be installed on an organization under a GitHub Enterprise subscription. OAuth Apps authorized to access repositories on an enterprise organization receive the higher limit, as long as the user is also part of that organization.

There are some exceptions to this increase. Personal access tokens, or PATs, are excluded from higher API limits. Unauthenticated requests do not receive an increase. Apps installed in a personal account context are excluded, because they are not directly affiliated with an enterprise organization. Note that abuse rate limits or secondary rate limits are still in effect to protect GitHub services, so the 15,000 requests can’t all be used in one minute of the hour.

For more detailed information, see the rate limit section for OAuth Apps and rate limits specific to GitHub Apps.

OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Flow

OAuth Apps and GitHub Apps now feature beta support for the OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Grant, in addition to the existing Web Application Flow. This allows any CLI client or developer tool to authenticate using a secondary system with a browser.

This feature is in beta and can be opted into in the GitHub Apps settings under Beta Features or OAuth Apps settings under Advanced. Then the new authorize device endpoint will be accessible.

Read the full documentation on Authorizing OAuth Apps and Authorizing Users for GitHub Apps for more information.

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OpenAPI Description of REST API

GitHub published a full description of its REST API in OpenAPI 3.0 specification compliant documents. The GitHub OpenAPI description contains more than 600 operations exposed in our API. For visual exploration of the API, you can load the description as a Postman Collection. Programmatically, the description can be used to generate mock servers, test suites, and bindings for languages not supported by Octokit.

The description is provided under two formats. The bundled version is preferred for most use cases as it makes use of OpenAPI components for reuse and readability. For tooling that has poor support for inline references to components, we also provide a fully dereferenced version.

Quarterly releases of the description are available for GitHub Enterprise Server and GitHub Private Instances, with versions like v2.21. More frequent updates to the description will be available for GitHub.com.

This feature is offered in beta as open source with an MIT license, in this repository.

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