GitHub repositories

The GitHub backend browses a repository on github.com without cloning it. gitview talks to the REST API on demand and caches conditionally, so revisiting pages costs almost nothing.

Targets

gitview gh:torvalds/linux
gitview https://github.com/torvalds/linux
gitview https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/kernel   # deep links work

A pasted URL can carry any deeper path; gitview takes the owner and repo and serves the whole repository. Both forms accept private repositories when your token can see them.

Tokens and rate limits

Anonymous GitHub API access allows 60 requests per hour, which browsing chews through quickly. With a token you get 5,000:

export GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_yourtoken
gitview gh:yourorg/private-repo

or -token ghp_yourtoken if you prefer a flag (the flag wins when both are set). Any classic or fine-grained token with read access to the repository works. The token stays in memory, goes only to api.github.com over TLS, and never appears in logs, error pages, or URLs.

gitview also plays nice with the quota it has: responses are cached and revalidated with ETags, so a page you reload costs a 304, not a fresh request. If you do hit the limit, gitview says so plainly and shows when the quota resets instead of erroring cryptically.

What works and what degrades

Everything on the feature matrix marked yes: home, trees, blobs, the finder, commit lists, per-file history, full commit diffs, and archive downloads (streamed from GitHub's own archive service).

Two things degrade, both because the REST API has no affordable call for them:

• The last-commit column on file tables stays empty; filling it would cost one API request per row.
• Blame is not offered; the button never appears.

Everything else is the full experience.