How to check GitHub user’s registration date…

adminVCS0 Comment
2 min. reading

…and other basic account information for any GitHub user?

There are at least two ways of getting this information:

  • the “clickable” way and
  • public API call

The documentation for API call tells about required token, when calling it from cURL or JavaScript.

But my tests has proven that simply pasting this URL to browsers’ address bar doesn’t require any token and works even if you are not logged in to any GitHub account.

The “clickable” was assumes following steps:

  1. Go to given user profile
  2. Scroll down to the bottom of the page
  3. Click on the oldest year that appears in the years list to the right
  4. Continue clicking on Show more activity button until it is gone
  5. Read the date next to Joined GitHub entry

In given example we can learn that Linus Torvalds has joined GitHub on September 3, 2011.

The (much faster?) API way is to call GET /users/{username} public API endpoint:

https://api.github.com/users/USERNAME

replacing USERNAME with given user name, i.e. https://api.github.com/users/torvalds:

to achieve pretty much the same.

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