How to delete a GitHub repo using the API

If you created the token you’re using through the Applications page, then this token will have these scopes: user, public_repo, repo, gist. You can verify this by making an API request with that token and looking at the response HTTP headers:

curl -v -H 'Authorization: token xxx' https://api.github.com

Look for the X-OAuth-Scopes response header which will have the list of scopes:

X-OAuth-Scopes: user, public_repo, repo, gist

However, to delete a repository, the token needs to have the delete_repo scope.

So, you need a token that has different scopes than the one you have. You can create such a token using the Authorizations API:

curl -v -u username -X POST https://api.github.com/authorizations -d '{"scopes":["delete_repo"], "note":"token with delete repo scope"}'

This will return a JSON document with the new token which you should be able to use to delete a repository:

{
  "id": XXXXX,
  "url": "https://api.github.com/authorizations/XXXXX",
  "app": {
    "name": "GitHub API",
    "url": "http://developer.github.com/v3/oauth/#oauth-authorizations-api",
    "client_id": "00000000000000000000"
  },
  "token": "XXXXXX",
  "note": "token with delete repo scope",
  "note_url": null,
  "created_at": "2013-10-11T20:34:49Z",
  "updated_at": "2013-10-11T20:34:49Z",
  "scopes": [
    "delete_repo"
  ]
}

Of course, when creating a token this way, you can ask for multiple scopes, not just the delete_repo scope.

Also, as a side-note, the reason why the API is returning a 404 error when you don’t have the right authorization is to prevent information leakage.