GitLab Trending Scraper

A serverless Apify Actor that fetches trending and popular public projects from GitLab using the official GitLab REST API. No HTML scraping, no browser overhead — just clean API data delivered to your dataset.

What does GitLab Trending Scraper do?

This Actor queries the gitlab.com/api/v4/projects endpoint to retrieve public GitLab projects sorted by stars, activity, creation date, or last update time. You can filter by programming language, set a minimum star threshold, or search by keywords in project names and descriptions. Results are pushed to the Apify dataset as structured JSON, ready for export, API access, or further processing.

Unlike web scrapers that parse HTML, this Actor calls the REST API directly — it's faster, more reliable, and won't break when the UI changes.

Why use GitLab Trending Scraper?

Discover popular open-source projects. Whether you're looking for the most-starred Python libraries, the most active Rust frameworks, or trending new projects in your tech stack — this Actor surfaces them instantly.

Market research and competitive analysis. Track which types of projects gain traction, what languages dominate specific categories, and how activity patterns shift over time.

Data enrichment and curation. Build catalogs of relevant GitLab projects for internal tooling, training datasets, or community resources.

CI/CD and automation pipelines. Integrate with Apify's schedule, webhook, and API ecosystem to run recurring scans and feed results into your workflows.

No authentication required. GitLab's public projects API is free and open — you don't need an API token or proxy configuration to start scraping.

Use Cases

• Open-source discovery: Find the top 100 most-starred projects each week and push them to a Slack channel or Airtable base.
• Language trend analysis: Monitor which programming languages are gaining the most projects each month, filtered by sort=activity and a language filter.
• Competitive benchmarking: Track star and fork counts for projects in your domain to benchmark your own project's growth.
• Seed data for recommendation engines: Build a curated dataset of high-quality open-source projects for a tool discovery platform.
• Data pipeline feedstock: Use Apify's API to trigger this Actor hourly, pass results through a webhook, and feed them into a dashboard or database.

How to use GitLab Trending Scraper

1. Run the Actor — Open the Actor in Apify Console and click Run. Or use the API with a POST request.
2. Configure input — Set your sort order, filters, and result limits in the Input tab. See the Input section below for all available options.
3. Get your data — When the run finishes, the results appear in the Output tab. You can export them as JSON, CSV, HTML, Excel, or XML.

Running locally

$apify run --input-file=test-input.json

Input

All input fields are optional except when noted.

Field	Type	Default	Description
sort	enum	stars	Sort criterion. Options: stars, activity, created, updated
language	string	—	Filter by primary programming language (e.g., python, javascript, rust)
max_results	integer	25	Maximum number of projects to return (max 100)
min_stars	integer	0	Only include projects with at least this many stars
search	string	—	Optional search query matched against project name and description

Example input

{
    "sort": "stars",
    "language": "python",
    "max_results": 10,
    "min_stars": 100,
    "search": "machine learning"
}

Output

Each result is a JSON object with the following fields:

{
    "name": "GitLab",
    "full_path": "gitlab-org/gitlab",
    "url": "https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab",
    "description": "GitLab is a complete DevOps platform...",
    "language": "Ruby",
    "stars": 6068,
    "forks": 4600,
    "open_issues_count": 720,
    "last_activity_at": "2026-07-11T23:51:42.143Z",
    "created_at": "2013-09-26T06:02:36.000Z",
    "visibility": "public",
    "readme_url": "https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/master/README.md"
}

You can download the dataset in formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel from the Apify Console.

Data fields

Field	Type	Description
name	string	Project name
full_path	string	Full namespace and path (e.g., gitlab-org/gitlab)
url	string	GitLab project URL
description	string	Project description
language	string	Primary programming language (nullable)
stars	integer	Star count
forks	integer	Fork count
open_issues_count	integer	Number of open issues
last_activity_at	string	ISO 8601 timestamp of last activity
created_at	string	ISO 8601 timestamp of creation
visibility	string	Visibility level (always public for this scraper)
readme_url	string	Direct URL to the project's README file

Pricing / Cost estimation

How much does it cost to scrape GitLab trending projects?

Each Actor run charges a small startup event (apify-actor-start at $0.00005) and a per-result event (result at $0.003) for results beyond the first 10 free results per run.

For example:

• 5 results: $0.00005 (only the startup fee, no result charges)
• 25 results: $0.00005 + 15 × $0.003 = $0.045
• 100 results: $0.00005 + 90 × $0.003 = $0.27

Results are counted per run — running the same query twice with max_results: 100 charges twice.

Tips and advanced options

• Use search together with sort to find projects matching a specific topic sorted by popularity. For example, search for "machine learning" with sort=stars to find the most-starred ML projects on GitLab.
• Use the language filter to narrow results to a specific programming language. This filter is applied after the API fetch, so results capped at max_results might include mixed-language projects if the API doesn't return enough language-tagged results.
• Set min_stars to filter out small or experimental projects. The default 0 returns everything, which includes projects with no stars and no activity.
• For recurring monitoring, schedule the Actor in Apify Console to run daily or weekly, and use webhooks to push results to your own infrastructure.

FAQ, disclaimers, and support

Is this legal? Yes. This Actor scrapes only public projects using GitLab's official REST API. All data is publicly accessible without authentication. You should review and comply with GitLab's Terms of Service when using their API.

Why doesn't the API return languages for some projects? GitLab's API only reports a primary language when the project has detectable source code. Configuration-only repositories or projects without recognized languages return null.

I need a custom version of this Actor. Submit an issue on the Issues tab or contact the author for custom development and consulting.

Found a bug or have a feature request? Open an issue on the GitHub repository or the Apify Actor's Issues tab.