title: Troubleshooting | GitHub API

* TOC

{:toc}

If you're encountering some oddities in the API, here's a list of resolutions to

some of the problems you may be experiencing.

Typically, we send a `404` error when your client isn't properly authenticated.

You might expect to see a `403 Forbidden` in these cases. However, since we don't

want to provide _any_ information about private repositories, the API returns a

`404` error instead.

To fix this, you can either ensure that [you're authenticating correctly](/guides/getting-started/),

or [make sure that your scopes are valid](/v3/oauth/#scopes).

Most API calls accessing a list of resources (_e.g._, users, issues, _e.t.c._) support

pagination. If you're making requests and receiving an incomplete set of results, you're

probably only seeing the first page. You'll need to request the remaining pages

in order to get more results.

It's important to *not* try and guess the format of the pagination URL. Not every

API call uses the same structure. Instead, extract the pagination information from

[the Link Header](/v3/#pagination), which is sent with every request.

The GitHub API has a pretty lenient quota for rate limits, for your enjoyment and

our safety. You can read more about it [here](/v3/#rate-limiting).

If you're using OAuth or Basic Authentication and are hitting your rate limits,

you might be able to fix the issue by either caching our results, or [using conditional requests](/v3/#conditional-requests).

In certainly exceptional cases, we may temporarily bump your rate limit higher. You

should be prepared to answer technical questions about your goal and your planned usage of the API. We may still choose not to bump your limit if we feel that you can achieve your wildest

dreams with the current rate limit (but don't worry, we'll help you out).