Github Trending Scraper

Scrape the GitHub Trending page to discover the most popular repositories by language and time period. Extract stars, forks, descriptions, and contributor data for trending open source projects.

What does GitHub Trending Scraper do?

This actor scrapes the GitHub Trending page to collect structured data about the hottest open source repositories. It supports filtering by programming language and time range to extract repository names, star counts, fork counts, descriptions, and period-specific star growth. This is the go-to tool for developers tracking rising projects, tech writers covering open source trends, or teams scouting for promising libraries and frameworks.

Features

• Scrape trending repos filtered by programming language
• Choose time range: daily, weekly, or monthly trending
• Extract total stars, period stars, forks, and contributor handles
• Get repository descriptions and direct GitHub URLs
• Configurable maximum number of results
• Fallback data when GitHub rate-limits or blocks the request

How to use

1. Navigate to the actor page on Apify Console
2. Click "Start" to run with default settings (weekly JavaScript trending repos)
3. Change the language, time range, and max results in the input
4. Download your data from the Dataset tab after the run completes

Input parameters

Parameter	Type	Description	Default
language	string	Programming language filter (leave empty for all)	javascript
timeRange	string	Trending time range (daily, weekly, monthly)	weekly
maxResults	integer	Maximum number of repos to scrape	100

Output format

Each repository in the dataset contains:

{
    "repoName": "vercel/next.js",
    "description": "The React Framework",
    "language": "JavaScript",
    "starsTotal": 120000,
    "starsToday": "1,234 stars this week",
    "forks": 26000,
    "contributors": "@user1, @user2",
    "repoUrl": "https://github.com/vercel/next.js",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-02-19T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Tips and tricks

• Use an empty language to get all-language trending repos for a broad view
• Compare daily vs weekly vs monthly trends to find repos with sustained growth
• Schedule daily runs to build a historical database of trending repositories
• Use the starsToday field to identify repos gaining momentum fastest

About

This actor is maintained by consummate_mandala. For questions, feedback, or feature requests, please open an issue on the actor page.