It's an open secret that you can find the email address from most GitHub users: it's in the git commit history! In the past, I would close repos and use git log to pull it out, but recently I learned that you can do it fairly easily via the GitHub API.

This function pulls the user's recent public events.

Create val
import { emailFromEvents } from "https://esm.town/v/stevekrouse/github-user-email/events.ts";

const emails = await emailFromEvents("stevekrouse");
console.log(emails); // [ "steveykrouse@gmail.com" ]

The limitation is that this endpoint only gets events from the last 30 days, so if the user hasn't committed in the last month, you won't get any results from this method. (Coming soon: a )

The GitHub API rate limits unauthenticated requests to 60 per hour per IP address. As a quick workaround, Val Town provides an IP-randomizer fetch proxy that makes it easy to get around these limits. These functions use that proxy by default. However, if you're using these functions at scale, please use a GITHUB_TOKEN to be a good GitHub citizen.