GitHub Trending Repositories & Release Velocity Tracker

A high-performance Apify Actor built in Python to scrape fast-growing GitHub repositories, star velocity, topics, license info, owner metadata, and recent release changelogs using GitHub's public REST APIs.

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🌟 Key Features

• ⚡ Ultra Fast & Lightweight: Uses direct HTTP requests with httpx async I/O. No headless browser overhead (~128MB RAM footprint).
• 🔍 Flexible Search Syntax: Leverage GitHub's search API syntax to find repositories by topic, language, star count, creation date, or update date.
• 📦 Release Velocity Tracking: Optionally extract latest release tags, publication dates, and release links to analyze project activity.
• 🔑 GitHub Token Support: Optionally pass your Personal Access Token (PAT) to increase API rate limits for large data collection.
• 📊 Store-Ready Dataset: Automatically pushes standardized JSON records to Apify's Dataset storage with tabular overview support.

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📥 Input Parameters

The Actor accepts the following input settings in JSON format:

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
query	string	"topic:llm created:>2026-01-01"	GitHub search syntax query (e.g. topic:llm, language:python stars:>1000).
sort	string	"stars"	Sort field: stars, forks, or updated.
order	string	"desc"	Sort direction: desc (High to Low) or asc (Low to High).
includeLatestRelease	boolean	true	Fetch the tag, release date, and URL for each repository's latest release.
maxItems	integer	50	Maximum number of repositories to return.
githubToken	string	null	(Optional) GitHub Personal Access Token to avoid unauthenticated rate limits.

Example Input JSON

{
  "query": "topic:ai-agent stars:>500",
  "sort": "stars",
  "order": "desc",
  "includeLatestRelease": true,
  "maxItems": 20
}

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📤 Output Format

Each extracted item in the dataset follows a structured Pydantic schema:

{
  "id": 12345678,
  "name": "example-agent",
  "full_name": "owner/example-agent",
  "html_url": "https://github.com/owner/example-agent",
  "description": "An autonomous AI agent framework.",
  "homepage": "https://example-agent.com",
  "language": "Python",
  "stars_count": 4500,
  "forks_count": 320,
  "open_issues_count": 15,
  "topics": ["ai", "agents", "llm"],
  "license_name": "MIT License",
  "created_at": "2026-01-15T10:00:00Z",
  "updated_at": "2026-08-25T08:30:00Z",
  "pushed_at": "2026-08-25T08:30:00Z",
  "owner_login": "owner",
  "owner_type": "Organization",
  "owner_url": "https://github.com/owner",
  "owner_avatar_url": "https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/123456",
  "latest_release": {
    "tag_name": "v1.2.0",
    "name": "v1.2.0 Performance Improvements",
    "published_at": "2026-08-20T14:22:00Z",
    "html_url": "https://github.com/owner/example-agent/releases/tag/v1.2.0",
    "is_prerelease": false
  }
}

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🚀 Running Locally

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10+
• pip

Step 1: Install Dependencies

$pip install -r requirements.txt

Step 2: Run the Actor

$python -m src.main

Or run via Apify CLI:

$apify run

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🐳 Docker Support

To build and run using Docker:

docker build -t github-velocity-scraper .
docker run -it github-velocity-scraper