GitHub Repo Scraper

Scrape trending GitHub repositories and search results — extract stars, forks, language, description, contributors, and topics. Track open-source trends, discover popular projects, and monitor the developer ecosystem.

Features

• Trending repositories — scrape GitHub's daily, weekly, or monthly trending page
• Language filtering — get trending repos for specific languages (Python, JavaScript, Rust, Go, etc.)
• Search by keyword — find repositories across all of GitHub sorted by stars
• Rich repo data — owner, name, description, language, stars, forks, period stars, topics, contributors
• Auto-pagination — follows next pages in search results for comprehensive coverage
• Period stats — see how many stars a repo gained today/this week/this month
• No API token needed — works out of the box using GitHub's public web pages

Output Example

{
  "owner": "openai",
  "name": "whisper",
  "fullName": "openai/whisper",
  "url": "https://github.com/openai/whisper",
  "description": "Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision",
  "language": "Python",
  "stars": 72450,
  "forks": 8120,
  "periodStars": 1250,
  "trendingPeriod": "daily",
  "contributors": ["jong-woo-ha", "raesetje", "Const-me"],
  "topics": ["speech-recognition", "machine-learning", "pytorch"],
  "scrapedAt": "2026-03-18T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Use Cases

• Trend monitoring — track which open-source projects are gaining traction in the developer community
• Technology research — discover the most popular tools, libraries, and frameworks by language or topic
• Competitive analysis — monitor competitor open-source projects for star growth and community engagement
• Developer recruiting — identify active contributors to trending repositories in specific technologies
• Investment research — find fast-growing open-source projects that may indicate market demand

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
scrapeTrending	Boolean	true	Whether to scrape GitHub's trending page
trendingPeriod	String	"daily"	Trending period: daily, weekly, monthly
languages	Array	[]	Filter trending repos by language (e.g., ["python", "rust"])
searchQueries	Array	[]	Search terms to find repositories (sorted by stars)
maxReposPerSource	Number	50	Maximum repositories to extract per source

Cost Estimation

• ~$0.25 per 100 repositories scraped
• Trending page (25 repos) completes in under 30 seconds
• Free tier: up to 50 repos with Apify free plan

FAQ

Q: What does "period stars" mean? A: Period stars show how many new stars a repository received during the selected trending period (today, this week, or this month). It indicates growth momentum.

Q: Can I filter trending repos by multiple languages? A: Yes. Pass an array of language names in the languages parameter, e.g., ["python", "javascript", "rust"]. Each language gets its own trending page scrape.

Q: Does it work with GitHub's API rate limits? A: The scraper uses GitHub's public web pages (not the REST API), so there are no API token requirements or rate limits. However, it runs with 5 concurrent requests to be respectful to GitHub's servers.