gist proxy

Serve a public GitHub Gist's raw file content via a stable URL.

Overview

/api/gist fetches a public GitHub Gist by URL and returns the file content with the correct Content-Type. The primary use case is hosting ephemeral HTML snippets — paste a gist URL into the query param and share the proxy URL instead.

The gist tool at `/gist` provides an interactive UI: enter a Gist URL and optional filename, preview the output in an iframe, and copy the proxy URL directly.

Usage

GET /api/gist?url=<gist-url>
GET /api/gist?url=<gist-url>&file=<filename>

Calling /api/gist with no params redirects here.

Examples

Serve the only (or first) file in a gist:

curl https://hypothesis.sh/api/gist?url=https://gist.github.com/octocat/abc123

Serve a specific file from a multi-file gist:

curl "https://hypothesis.sh/api/gist?url=https://gist.github.com/octocat/abc123&file=index.html"

Content-Type

The Content-Type response header is set from the file's detected type as reported by the GitHub API. An HTML file returns text/html, a JSON file returns application/json, and so on — so browsers will render or display the content appropriately.

Caching

Responses are cached for 60 seconds (Cache-Control: public, max-age=60). Updates to the underlying gist will be reflected after at most one minute.

Limitations

• Public gists only. Private gists return a 404.
• No authentication. Requests to the GitHub API are unauthenticated and subject to GitHub's anonymous rate limits (60 requests/hour per IP).
• The gist content is fetched on each (uncached) request — this is not a permanent hosting solution.

Error responses