Vim Awesome Plugins Scraper

Export the Vim Awesome directory (about 19,000 Vim and Neovim plugins) as clean, structured data: name, author, GitHub stars, plugin-manager user count, vim.org downloads and rating, category, tags, short description, GitHub and Vim Awesome URLs, and created/updated timestamps.

Only one other Vim Awesome scraper exists on Apify Store, and general “vim” Store search is dominated by Vimeo video tools — not editor plugins. If you build Vim/Neovim configs, curate plugin lists, research the editor ecosystem, or track competing plugins, this Actor gives you the directory over the same public JSON API the site uses.

What can it do?

• Full directory export. Paginated public API (/api/plugins, 20 per page), up to the full ~19.5k catalog.
• Keyword search. Free-text query passed through to Vim Awesome (for example git, lsp, completion, colorscheme).
• Category filter. Language, completion, code-display, integration, interface, command, other, uncategorized.
• Popularity filters. Minimum GitHub stars and/or plugin-manager users.
• Flexible sort. Plugin-manager users, GitHub stars, vim.org downloads, recently updated, or name.
• Fast and cheap. Plain JSON over HTTP. No browser, no proxy, no login. Runs on 256 MB.

Use cases

• Neovim/Vim distribution authors tracking popular plugins and stars
• Ecosystem research: which categories and tags dominate
• Lead lists of plugin maintainers and their GitHub repos
• Scheduled snapshots to detect newly popular or updated plugins

Source and rate limits

• Source: https://vimawesome.com/api/plugins?query=&page=N (unauthenticated JSON; same endpoints the website calls).
• Single plugin: https://vimawesome.com/api/plugins/{slug}.
• Page size: 20 plugins per page (~974 pages for the full catalog).
• Robots / politeness: The site does not publish a useful robots.txt for the API (the /robots.txt path serves the SPA shell). This Actor still behaves politely: modest concurrency (about 3–4 parallel requests), retries with backoff, and a clear User-Agent identifying the scraper. Do not hammer the API; prefer smaller maxItems for exploratory runs.
• Auth: None. Do not scrape authenticated/admin endpoints.

Input

Field	Type	Description
searchQuery	string	Optional keyword. Empty = browse full catalog (popularity order from the API).
category	string	Optional: language, completion, code-display, integration, interface, command, other, uncategorized.
minGithubStars	integer	Skip plugins below this star count.
minPluginManagerUsers	integer	Skip plugins below this Vim Awesome popularity count.
sortBy	enum	pluginManagerUsers (default), githubStars, vimorgDownloads, updated, name.
maxItems	integer	Max results (default 100; set ~20000 for the full catalog).

Example: top Git integrations by plugin-manager users:

{ "searchQuery": "git", "category": "integration", "sortBy": "pluginManagerUsers", "maxItems": 50 }

Tip: a 100-item run finishes in a few seconds. A full-catalog run (~974 pages) typically completes in a few minutes at the default concurrency.

Output

{
  "slug": "fugitive-vim",
  "name": "fugitive.vim",
  "normalizedName": "fugitive",
  "author": "Tim Pope",
  "githubOwner": "tpope",
  "githubRepo": "vim-fugitive",
  "category": "integration",
  "tags": ["git"],
  "shortDesc": "fugitive.vim: A Git wrapper so awesome, it should be illegal",
  "githubStars": 14774,
  "pluginManagerUsers": 47185,
  "githubBundles": 46852,
  "vimorgDownloads": 17813,
  "vimorgRating": 4049,
  "vimorgNumRaters": 1191,
  "vimorgType": "utility",
  "vimorgUrl": "http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2975",
  "githubUrl": "https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive",
  "url": "https://vimawesome.com/plugin/fugitive-vim",
  "apiUrl": "https://vimawesome.com/api/plugins/fugitive-vim",
  "createdAt": "2009-10-09T02:29:49+00:00",
  "updatedAt": "2021-09-07T18:39:52+00:00",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-14T09:58:00+00:00"
}

Export to JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or HTML, or pull results through the Apify API, webhooks, Make, Zapier or n8n.

Pricing

Free to use right now: you pay only the tiny Apify platform usage of your own run. Pay-per-result pricing may be added later (~$2 per 1,000 plugin results), with advance notice as Apify requires. Monetization is not enabled on the Store listing yet.

FAQ

Is it legal? The Actor reads only the public, unauthenticated JSON API that Vim Awesome’s own frontend uses. It requests pages politely with limited concurrency and collects only public plugin metadata.

How fresh is the data? Fetched live on every run. updatedAt / createdAt come from Vim Awesome’s Unix timestamps.

Something broken or a field missing? Open an issue on the Actor’s Issues tab.