Hello world, this is my first repository, I wanted to share some stories of how I picked my GitHub username.
Because GitHub isn't exactly like social media, when you've built a lot of important repositories, the cost of changing your username increases, you have to accept your username or create a new account, I think it's not an option for many people, So it's better to clearly consider your needs before registering an account, not only nice and cool names, but also easy to type, the shorter the better.
GitHub allows everyone to check user pages, I initially wrote a script and created some dictionaries with character combinations to check all URLs https://github.com/$username. this worked fine at first, but unfortunately after a few minutes I triggered an Error: 429 Too many requests, so I started searching to see if there was a better way, and I found that GitHub provides an API [1] that can be used to retrieve registered username and available username, but I don't have an account how can I get an API token?
There are two ways: First, register an account with any username, then get the API token and then find the appropriate username and modify it. Or bypass the restriction with proxies 
, which I know is rude, so I chose the first way.
GitHub serves 5,000 requests per hour for users using the API [1], which seems a bit low considering the short usernames that are still available from millions of usernames, but compared to only 60 requests per IP per hour without the API, that's a huge difference.
I generated the 2-character dictionary and found some "available" usernames, but I found out that they were just reserved usernames, then I tried the 3-character dictionary again, this time I didn't intend to check all 3-characters, because I didn't want to wait too long, and all combinations were already well over the limit of 5,000 per hour, I generated easy-to-remember dictionaries from all combinations, then I didn't find a username that worked for me, and finally I found my current username in a 4-character easy-to-remember dictionary.
Register GitHub, then click on your avatar in the upper right corner, enter Settings, click on the left to enter Developer Settings, and generate a Personal Access Token.
Next download or clone this repository, use the dictionary provided in the repository or generate your own, copy a dictionary and the script in the same directory, edit the script and fill in your current GitHub username and token, run the following command:
sh ./find-available-github-usernames.sh dictionary.txt
Notes:
The dictionary needs to be in the same directory as the script, and the dictionary does not need to add the path to the argument, just the file name.
The working principle of the script is very simple, import the first line of the dictionary, check whether the username is available, if got HTTP: 404, add it to the found.txt, if encounter an error, print and output to the find-available-github-usernames.log, and finally delete all checked lines in the dictionary.
The reason for deleting the lines in the dictionary is to ensure that the task can be terminated at any time by pressing ^c (Ctrl+C) in the terminal and don't have to start from the beginning on the next run.
The first time the script is run, a backup file with a .bak suffix is generated for the dictionary.
2-characters_00-99_AA-ZZ.txt Consists of 2 characters, including all combinations of letters and digits.
3-characters_AAA-ZZZ.txt and 4-characters_AAAA-ZZZZ.txt Contains all combinations of all 3 and 4 letters, no digits.
XX-characters_easy-to-remember_XX.txt Usernames with repeated characters.
I recommend trying the easy-to-remember ones in my dictionaries first, as those that have some kind of regularity, like multiple occurrences of the same character, and easier to type. other dictionaries are full dictionaries, which means they may contain thousands of usernames.
For 2 characters[2]:
printf "%s\n" {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z}{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z} > ./2-characters.txt
echo {a..z}{a..z}{a..z}{a..z} | tr ' ' '\n' > ./4-characters.txt
grep '\(.\).*\1' 3-characters_AAA-ZZZ.txt > ./3-characters_easy-to-remember_AAA-ZZZ.txt
grep '\(.\).*\1.*\1' 4-characters_AAAA-ZZZZ.txt > ./4-characters_easy-to-remember_AAAA-ZZZZ.txt
This will extract usernames that have the same letter repeated multiple times, like aaa, aab, aba...[5]
comm -23 ./dictionary.txt ./easy-to-remember.txt > ./easy-to-remember-excluded.txt
GitHub may for some reason keep some usernames that are not open for registration, such as 47, fr, ccc, although I found a lot of 2-character and 3-character usernames when I tried to register, but they were not available, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try those 2 and 3-character usernames, because at any time a user could delete their account or change their username, so you might have better luck than me.
curl -i -u "$USER:$TOKEN" -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json" https://api.github.com/rate_limit
Unfortunately, I have no development plans for this, but you can use split -l 500 dictionary.txt to truncate the dictionary file and run multiple terminals at the same time.
It should work fine with WSL and some 3rd party Linux tools (Cygwin or Git bash).
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In the GitHub Desktop menu, click Preferences.
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In the Preferences window, verify the following:
- To view your GitHub username, click Accounts. [8]
No, I'm not going to use my time to continue developing and contributing to this repository, it's just a sharing of some experiences, if you're interested you can create something better!
[1] https://docs.github.com/en/rest/overview/resources-in-the-rest-api
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57446583/find-all-combinations-of-two-character-letters-digits-similar-to-jot1-for-num/57446814#57446814
[3] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24279726/iterate-over-letters-in-a-for-loop/24279801#24279801
[4] https://askubuntu.com/questions/461144/how-to-replace-spaces-with-newlines-enter-in-a-text-file/461153#461153
[5] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14223350/find-lines-in-file-that-contain-duplicate-characters/14223686#14223686
[6] https://askubuntu.com/questions/461144/how-to-replace-spaces-with-newlines-enter-in-a-text-file/461153#461153
[7] https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/rate-limit
[8] https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-and-managing-your-github-user-account/managing-email-preferences/remembering-your-github-username-or-email
