GitHub Auth: User Email Is Null Even with Scope 'user:email'

I was coding my new app today and wanted users to be able to log in using GitHub, pretty simple, right? Nope, Github hit me with null for the emails.

As you can see in the image below (line 40), my email variable was returning as null even though I had set the scope to user:email in my route.

So what’s going on?

Turns out, GitHub doesn’t always return the email in the profile, even if you add user:email as a scope. If the user’s email is private or even public, GitHub just skips it for “security reasons”.

The soluction? You have to Fetch it yourself.

Below is the snippet I added inside my GitHub strategy:

let email = null;        

// GitHub not providing email so explicitly fetch it
const res = await fetch("https://api.github.com/user/emails", {
  headers: {
    Authorization: `token ${accessToken}`
  }
});

const emails = await res.json();

Since github won’t automatically provide us with the email we fetch it ourselves by calling the github email api using the aceesToken provided by possport.js into the Authorization header, and boom, you should have all the user emails primary and non-primary.

And just like that, it works.