I need to fetch the number of public repositories of a user using the Github API.
I know that we can get a list of repos using /users/{username}/repos. This query returns a list of repositories.
What I want is just the total number of repositories not the entire list. If I try to count the repositories using /users/{username}/repos it works fine for the users that have smaller number of repositories but for users that have a large number of repositories , the API call takes too much time.
Is there any way by which I can get just the number of repos and not the entire list?
Instead of getting the list of repositories, you can get the user object and look at the public_repos field; for example, using the GitHub CLI:
$ gh api users/bewuethr | jq '.public_repos'
21
The total_count field on the first response represents the total count of repositories matching, the response has your answer already.