The simplest way to get commit count of a GitHub repository through the API

commitCount.py

import requests
import re

def commitCount(u, r):
	return re.search('\d+$', requests.get('https://api.github.com/repos/{}/{}/commits?per_page=1'.format(u, r)).links['last']['url']).group()

def latestCommitInfo(u, r):
	""" Get info about the latest commit of a GitHub repo """
	response = requests.get('https://api.github.com/repos/{}/{}/commits?per_page=1'.format(u, r))
	commit = response.json()[0]; commit['number'] = re.search('\d+$', response.links['last']['url']).group()
	return commit

commitCount.sh

curl -I -k "https://api.github.com/repos/:owner/:repo/commits?per_page=1" | sed -n '/^[Ll]ink:/ s/.*"next".*page=\([0-9]*\).*"last".*/\1/p'

### And that's all !
# I saw many fighting with finding first commit SHA or similar fancy thing.
# Here we just rely on the GH API, asking commits at 1 per page and parsing the last page number in the header of the reply (whose body only holds the last commit !)
# So this is robust and bandwidth efficient. :)

# If one want the commit count of a specific SHA, just use :
curl -I -k "https://api.github.com/repos/:owner/:repo/commits?per_page=1&sha=:sha" | sed -n '/^[Ll]ink:/ s/.*"next".*page=\([0-9]*\).*"last".*/\1/p'

This post was very helpful for me. Thanks a lot!!
I'v been working for reading stats via REST API, especially to get total commits count and subtotal on a given period.
By adding query options, "since=" & "until=", subtotal commits count can be easily get. But a "KeyError" is raised when there's no commit at all. So I added error handling like

while True:
    try:
        n_commits = re.search(...)
        break
    except:
        n_commits = 0
        break

Is there a better solution to handle error/exceptions for "0" commits?

@deniskim82 : you can store the request response into a variable and check for it, eg :

res = requests.get('https://api.github.com/repos/{}/{}/commits?per_page=1'.format(u, r))
if hasattr(res, 'links'):
    return re.search('\d+$', res.links['last']['url']).group()
return None