Skip to main content

GitHub

This example goes over how to load data from a GitHub repository. You can set the GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN environment variable to a GitHub access token to increase the rate limit and access private repositories.

Setup​

The GitHub loader requires the ignore npm package as a peer dependency. Install it like this:

npm install ignore

Usage​

import { GithubRepoLoader } from "langchain/document_loaders/web/github";

export const run = async () => {
  const loader = new GithubRepoLoader(
    "https://github.com/langchain-ai/langchainjs",
    {
      branch: "main",
      recursive: false,
      unknown: "warn",
      maxConcurrency: 5, // Defaults to 2
    }
  );
  const docs = await loader.load();
  console.log({ docs });
};

API Reference:

The loader will ignore binary files like images.

Using .gitignore Syntax​

To ignore specific files, you can pass in an ignorePaths array into the constructor:

import { GithubRepoLoader } from "langchain/document_loaders/web/github";

export const run = async () => {
  const loader = new GithubRepoLoader(
    "https://github.com/langchain-ai/langchainjs",
    { branch: "main", recursive: false, unknown: "warn", ignorePaths: ["*.md"] }
  );
  const docs = await loader.load();
  console.log({ docs });
  // Will not include any .md files
};

API Reference:

Using a Different GitHub Instance​

You may want to target a different GitHub instance than github.com, e.g. if you have a GitHub Enterprise instance for your company. For this you need two additional parameters:

  • baseUrl - the base URL of your GitHub instance, so the githubUrl matches <baseUrl>/<owner>/<repo>/...
  • apiUrl - the URL of the API endpoint of your GitHub instance
import { GithubRepoLoader } from "langchain/document_loaders/web/github";

export const run = async () => {
  const loader = new GithubRepoLoader(
    "https://github.your.company/org/repo-name",
    {
      baseUrl: "https://github.your.company",
      apiUrl: "https://github.your.company/api/v3",
      accessToken: "ghp_A1B2C3D4E5F6a7b8c9d0",
      branch: "main",
      recursive: true,
      unknown: "warn",
    }
  );
  const docs = await loader.load();
  console.log({ docs });
};

API Reference:

Dealing with Submodules​

In case your repository has submodules, you have to decide if the loader should follow them or not. You can control this with the boolean processSubmodules parameter. By default, submodules are not processed. Note that processing submodules works only in conjunction with setting the recursive parameter to true.

import { GithubRepoLoader } from "langchain/document_loaders/web/github";

export const run = async () => {
  const loader = new GithubRepoLoader(
    "https://github.com/langchain-ai/langchainjs",
    {
      branch: "main",
      recursive: true,
      processSubmodules: true,
      unknown: "warn",
    }
  );
  const docs = await loader.load();
  console.log({ docs });
};

API Reference:

Note, that the loader will not follow submodules which are located on another GitHub instance than the one of the current repository.

Stream large repository​

For situations where processing large repositories in a memory-efficient manner is required. You can use the loadAsStream method to asynchronously streams documents from the entire GitHub repository.

import { GithubRepoLoader } from "langchain/document_loaders/web/github";

export const run = async () => {
  const loader = new GithubRepoLoader(
    "https://github.com/langchain-ai/langchainjs",
    {
      branch: "main",
      recursive: false,
      unknown: "warn",
      maxConcurrency: 3, // Defaults to 2
    }
  );

  const docs = [];
  for await (const doc of loader.loadAsStream()) {
    docs.push(doc);
  }

  console.log({ docs });
};

API Reference:

Help us out by providing feedback on this documentation page: