Gutenberg Block to retrieve GitHub public repositories (and enhance a portfolio)

The inspiration for this block came from a feature available in my portfolio built with React. This feature displays my public repositories in GitHub. More details and the source code can be seen in this article.

The present Gutenberg block does basically the same thing, but instead of React and Javascript, some code was rewritten in PHP.

Dynamic Blocks

Creating a Gutenberg Block whose purpose is mainly styling and HTML generation can be done almost entirely with Javascript. But for other features like displaying posts, doing remote API calls, etc, it's a better approach to render the block using PHP and not JavaScript.

To achieve that, in the index.php file of our block, we added the argument render_callback to the register_block_type function. That will handle the output of the block, superseding the javascript save/frontend function in the /src/index.js file.

On time, on the /src/index.js file we need to disable the save function.

index.js

registerBlockType( 
    metadata, {
        edit: Edit,
        save: () => null,
    } 
)

Then, on index.php:

//index.php

   function block_register()
    {
        register_block_type(
            __DIR__,
            [
                'attributes'      => [
                    'githubuser' => [
                        'type'    => 'string',
                        ],
                ],
                'render_callback' => array($this, 'render_retrieved_github_repos'),
                ]
        );
    }

Later, this callback function render_retrieved_github_repos will be responsible to render the block. In this specific case, the function fetches the Github API data.

//index.php 

 function render_retrieved_github_repos( $attributes, $content )
    {

        // Get the username input 
        $username = $attributes['githubuser'];

        $response = wp_remote_retrieve_body( 
wp_remote_get("https://api.github.com/users/" . $username . "/repos") );

        /* Decode the response */
        $repositories = json_decode($response, true);

        ob_start(); ?>

This callback function render_retrieved_github_repos also display the data fetched from the Github API.

//index.php

<?php foreach ( $repositories as $repo ): ?>

  <div class="">

    <a href="<?php echo $repo["svn_url"]?>"class=""> <?php echo $repo["name"] ?></a>

     <p class=""><?php echo $repo["description"] ?><a href="<?php $repo["svn_url"] ?>"class="">Go to repository</a></p>

     <p class=""><?php $date = strtotime($repo["created_at"])?><?php echo date('Y/M/d', $date);?></p>

     <p class=""><?php foreach ($repo["topics"] as $topic) {echo $topic;}?></p>

     <p class=""><?php echo $repo["stargazers_count"]?> stars</p>

     <p class=""><?php echo $repo["forks_count"]?> forks </p>

  </div>

 <?php endforeach; ?> 

<?php return ob_get_clean();

}

The complete code is available on the GitHub repository here.

Using Gihut API

About the GitHub API, you can easily display a list with public repositories or other information you want of any GitHub user using the GitHub API.