📈 GitHub Trending Repos Search — Apify Actor

Scrape trending GitHub repositories by programming language, time period, and sort order. Zero API keys required. Returns stars, forks, topics, and full metadata for every repo.

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✨ Features

• 🔍 Filter by language — Python, JavaScript, Rust, Go, TypeScript, and 20+ more
• ⏱ Time period — Daily, weekly, or monthly trending repos
• 📊 Sort options — By stars (hot) or last updated (fresh)
• 📄 Pagination — Fetch up to 100 results (GitHub max), auto-paginates
• 🔁 Auto-retry — 3 retry attempts with exponential backoff on rate limits and server errors
• 🛡 No API key — Uses the public GitHub Search API (unauthenticated)
• 📦 Structured output — Clean JSON with name, description, stars, forks, URL, language, topics, author, updated date
• 🏆 Top N summary — Console output shows top 5 with star counts

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📥 Input

Field	Type	Default	Possible Values	Description
language	string	python	See Supported Languages	Programming language filter
maxResults	integer	25	1 – 100	Maximum repos to return (per run)
since	string	daily	daily, weekly, monthly	Time range for trending repos
sort	string	stars	stars, updated	Sort by star count or last update

🌐 Supported Languages

python	javascript	typescript	rust
go	java	kotlin	swift
cpp	csharp	ruby	php
shell	lua	haskell	elixir
scala	dart	r	perl
zig	crystal	solidity

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📤 Output

Each run produces a single dataset entry with the following structure:

Field	Type	Description
language	string	Language requested
since	string	Time period requested
sort	string	Sort field requested
totalResults	integer	Number of repos returned
results	array	Array of repository objects

Each repository object in results:

Field	Type	Description
name	string	Full repo name (e.g. owner/repo)
description	string	Repo description (max 500 chars)
stars	integer	Star count
forks	integer	Fork count
url	string	GitHub URL
language	string	Detected language
topics	array	GitHub topic tags
updated	string	Last update timestamp (ISO 8601)
author	string	Owner login

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🎯 Use Cases

1. 🔬 Tech scouting — Find what's trending in open source. Spot the next big framework before it goes mainstream.
2. 🎯 Developer recruiting — Discover top talent contributing to trending projects in your stack.
3. 📈 Market & trend research — Track language popularity shifts over time. Compare Rust vs Go activity weekly.
4. 🤖 AI/ML training data — Curate repositories for fine-tuning code models, RAG datasets, or benchmark collections.
5. 📰 Content creation — Generate "Trending This Week" roundups for newsletters, blogs, or social media.
6. 📊 Competitive intelligence — Monitor which open-source projects are gaining traction in your industry.

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📋 Example

Input

{
  "language": "rust",
  "maxResults": 10,
  "since": "weekly",
  "sort": "stars"
}

Output (sample)

{
  "language": "rust",
  "since": "weekly",
  "sort": "stars",
  "totalResults": 10,
  "results": [
    {
      "name": "rustdesk/rustdesk",
      "description": "An open-source remote desktop, and alternative to TeamViewer.",
      "stars": 84523,
      "forks": 11234,
      "url": "https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk",
      "language": "Rust",
      "topics": ["remote-desktop", "rust", "vnc"],
      "updated": "2025-07-16T12:34:56Z",
      "author": "rustdesk"
    }
  ]
}

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❓ FAQ

❔ Do I need a GitHub API token?

No. The actor calls the public GitHub Search API without authentication. GitHub's unauthenticated rate limit (~10 req/min) is sufficient for occasional use at 25 results per run. For higher throughput, the actor automatically retries on 403/429 with Retry-After header support.

❔ Why am I getting fewer results than maxResults?

GitHub's Search API caps unauthenticated requests at 100 results per query and may return fewer if there aren't enough trending repos in the given language + time window. The actor transparently handles pagination and returns whatever is available.

❔ Can I run this on a schedule?

Yes! Apify lets you schedule any actor on a cron. Set since: "weekly" with a weekly schedule to get a consistent snapshot of trending projects over time.

❔ What happens when GitHub rate-limits me?

Built-in retry logic catches 403 (rate limit) and 429 (too many requests) responses, reads the Retry-After header, waits the specified duration (up to 120 seconds), and retries up to 3 times. Partial results are preserved if a retry ultimately fails.

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💰 Pricing

Metric	Cost
Per run (25 repos)	$0.00
Per run (100 repos)	$0.00
Platform fee	Apify platform usage charges apply

This actor only charges for successful data pushes. Failed runs are free.

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🏷 Tags

github trending open-source developer-tools scraper repositories stars programming-languages

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