GitHub Scraper

Extract public data from GitHub — repositories, user profiles, issues, stars, contributors, and more — in a structured format ready for analysis.

Why Use This Actor?

GitHub is the world's largest code hosting platform, and it is also a rich source of signals for developer relations, recruiting, market intelligence, and open-source research. But the GitHub API has rate limits that make large-scale collection slow and painful.

This actor lets you collect GitHub data at scale without hitting API throttles or writing any code. Run it on demand or on a schedule and get clean, structured output every time.

Common reasons teams use this actor:

• Identify active developers and contributors in a specific technology or niche
• Track adoption of open-source tools by watching star growth over time
• Build recruitment pipelines targeting developers with specific language expertise
• Monitor competitor repositories for activity, issues, and community growth
• Research the open-source ecosystem for a category before building or investing

What Data You Get

Repository Fields

Field	Description
name	Repository name
fullName	owner/repo format
description	Repository description
stars	Star count
forks	Fork count
watchers	Watcher count
language	Primary programming language
topics	Repository topic tags
license	License type
createdAt	Creation date
updatedAt	Last update timestamp
openIssues	Number of open issues
url	Repository URL

User/Profile Fields

Field	Description
login	GitHub username
name	Display name
bio	Profile bio
company	Company listed on profile
location	Self-reported location
publicRepos	Number of public repositories
followers	Follower count
following	Following count
email	Public email (if listed)
blog	Website/blog URL
joinedAt	Account creation date

Use Cases

Developer Recruiting

Search for contributors to repositories in your tech stack. Filter by location, activity level, and language expertise. Export a list of potential candidates with their public contact info.

Open-Source Intelligence

Track how fast a new library is growing. Monitor issue velocity and contributor count as signals of project health. Identify abandoned projects before depending on them.

Competitive Research

Watch when a competitor open-sources something. Track their engineering team growth via contributor activity. Benchmark your own repo metrics against the field.

Market Research

Count the number of repositories using a specific framework or library. Understand which tools are gaining traction by watching star velocity.

Sales Prospecting

Find companies actively using a technology by searching their public repos. Identify engineering leads at target accounts.

How to Use

1. Open the actor on Apify and click Try for free
2. Enter a GitHub search query, username, or repository URL
3. Set your desired result limit and data type (repos, users, issues)
4. Click Start and wait for the run to complete
5. Download as JSON, CSV, or stream results via the Apify API

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
searchQuery	string	GitHub search term (e.g., "machine learning python stars:>1000")
type	string	Data type: repositories, users, or issues
maxResults	number	Maximum number of results to return
username	string	Specific GitHub username to scrape profile/repos for
repoUrl	string	Specific repository URL to extract data from
includeContributors	boolean	Whether to include contributor list for repos

Sample Output

{
  "name": "awesome-python",
  "fullName": "vinta/awesome-python",
  "description": "A curated list of awesome Python frameworks, libraries, software and resources",
  "stars": 218000,
  "forks": 24500,
  "language": "Python",
  "topics": ["python", "awesome", "awesome-list"],
  "license": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "openIssues": 523,
  "createdAt": "2014-06-27T21:00:06Z",
  "updatedAt": "2026-04-20T12:34:00Z",
  "url": "https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python"
}

Pricing

This actor uses pay-per-event billing — you are only charged for data delivered. There are no upfront fees or minimum commitments. New Apify accounts come with a free tier to test the actor at no cost.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does this require a GitHub account or token? No. The actor collects publicly available data. No authentication is required from you.

What are the rate limits? The actor handles rate limiting internally. You do not need to manage API quotas yourself.

Can I scrape private repositories? No. Only public GitHub data is accessible and collected.

Can I get contributor data for a specific repo? Yes. Enable the includeContributors option when running with a specific repository URL.

Can I filter results by programming language or stars? Yes. Use GitHub's standard search syntax in the searchQuery field, such as language:rust stars:>500.

Is scheduling supported? Yes. Apify's built-in scheduler lets you run this actor on any cron schedule.