GitHub Activity Stream — Commits, PRs, Issues & Releases API (No API Key)

Stream public activity from GitHub — commits, pull requests, issues, releases and user events — for any repo, org or user, normalized into one flat schema. Every event becomes a structured row with type, repo, actor, title, state, additions/deletions, labels, tagName and URL, time-windowed and paginated so a single run returns thousands of events. Built for AI coding agents, dependency monitors and release trackers that need current dev activity — not stale training-set snapshots. Direct HTTP + JSON, no browser, no login, no API key (keyless GitHub REST API, with an optional token for higher throughput).

🏆 Why this GitHub Activity Stream scraper?

4 modes (repo / org / user / bulk) · thousands of events per run · one normalized schema across commits, PRs, issues & releases · time-windowed (since) delta runs · proxy IP rotation to beat the keyless rate cap · export to JSON / CSV / Excel. The unofficial GitHub activity API alternative for AI-agent dev grounding, release tracking and dependency monitoring.

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✨ What this Actor does / Key features

• 📦 Commits — first-line message as title, author and date, paginated with a since window.
• 🔀 Pull requests — additions, deletions, commits, merged, state and labels straight from the PR object.
• ❗ Issues — open/closed state and labels (pure issues; PRs are pulled separately so you never double-count).
• 🏷️ Releases — tagName, name, isPrerelease flag and publish date for every release.
• 👤 User events — a user's public event feed (pushes, PRs, issues, reviews) — up to 90 days of history.
• 🏢 Org-wide scan — list an org's public repos (sorted by recent activity) and pull activity from each in one run.
• 📅 Time-windowed deltas — the since filter keeps only events after a date, ideal for daily/weekly monitoring runs.
• 🤖 AI-agent friendly — predictable fields, ISO 8601 dates, nullable values; drop straight into a prompt or a vector store.
• 🌐 Proxy IP rotation — Apify datacenter proxy rotates the source IP per request to spread GitHub's keyless 60 req/hr/IP limit.
• 🔁 Retry & backoff — 403 (rate-limit) and 5xx trigger exponential-backoff retry; deleted/private repos exit gracefully.
• 🔑 Optional token — supply a free GitHub Personal Access Token to raise the limit from 60 to 5000 req/hr for heavy use.
• 💰 Pay-per-result — charged per saved event, never per run; empty results (deleted/private repo) are free.

🚀 Quick start (3 steps)

1. Configure — pick a mode (repo, org, user or bulk) and its target (a microsoft/vscode slug, an org like kubernetes, or a user like torvalds). Add a since date and trim eventTypes if you only want, say, releases.
2. Run — click Start. The Actor resolves your targets, paginates each activity endpoint through a rotating proxy IP, and streams normalized events into your dataset.
3. Get your data — open the Output tab and export to JSON, CSV, Excel or XML, or pull it via the Apify API. Use the Overview view to scan everything or By type to pivot on commit/PR/issue/release.

📥 Input

Pick a mode and give it a target. Everything else is optional — leave since empty for full history (capped by maxPerType), or set it for a delta window.

Example — single repo, one week of activity

{
  "mode": "repo",
  "repos": ["microsoft/vscode"],
  "eventTypes": ["commits", "pulls", "issues", "releases"],
  "since": "2026-06-29",
  "maxPerType": 200
}

Example — org-wide scan (monitor an ecosystem)

{
  "mode": "org",
  "org": "kubernetes",
  "maxOrgRepos": 15,
  "eventTypes": ["pulls", "releases"],
  "since": "2026-06-01"
}

Example — user public activity + bulk multi-repo

{
  "mode": "user",
  "user": "torvalds",
  "maxPerType": 100
}

{
  "mode": "bulk",
  "repos": ["facebook/react", "vercel/next.js", "microsoft/typescript"],
  "eventTypes": ["releases"],
  "since": "2026-06-01"
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	enum	repo	What to monitor: repo (one repo, highest volume), org (all of an org's public repos), user (a user's public events), bulk (many repos in one run). Required.
repos	array	[]	owner/repo slugs for repo and bulk mode, e.g. microsoft/vscode, facebook/react.
org	string	—	GitHub organization slug for org mode, e.g. kubernetes, vercel.
user	string	—	GitHub username for user mode, e.g. torvalds.
eventTypes	array	all	Which activity types to collect: commits, pulls, issues, releases. Fewer types = faster.
since	string	—	ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD or full ISO). Only events after this date. Leave empty for full history.
maxPerType	integer	200	Cap per event type per repo (commits, PRs, issues, releases each). Range 1–1000.
maxOrgRepos	integer	20	Cap on how many repos to scan in org mode. Range 1–200.
ghToken	string	—	Optional GitHub Personal Access Token — raises the rate limit from 60 to 5000 req/hr. Public scope is enough.
useApifyProxy	boolean	true	Route through the Apify datacenter proxy (IP rotation) to spread the keyless 60 req/hr/IP limit.

Tip — always set since for monitoring. Without it you pull full history (capped by maxPerType). For a recurring digest, set since to your last run time so each run is a clean delta. Commits are the highest-volume (and slowest) type — trim eventTypes to ["releases"] or ["pulls","releases"] when you don't need them.

📤 Output

One row per activity event — commit, pull request, issue or release — streamed to the default dataset, exportable to JSON, CSV, Excel or XML. Here is a trimmed sample pull-request record:

{
  "repo": "microsoft/vscode",
  "type": "pull",
  "number": 210543,
  "title": "Fix terminal rendering on macOS",
  "action": null,
  "state": "closed",
  "actor": "user123",
  "createdAt": "2026-06-28T10:00:00Z",
  "updatedAt": "2026-07-01T15:00:00Z",
  "additions": 142,
  "deletions": 38,
  "commits": 3,
  "labels": ["bug", "terminal"],
  "merged": true,
  "isPrerelease": null,
  "tagName": null,
  "url": "https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/210543",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-07-06T12:00:00.000Z"
}

A release row carries type: "release", tagName: "1.21.0" and isPrerelease: false. A commit row carries type: "commit" with the first-line message as title. A user event carries the GitHub event type (e.g. PushEvent, PullRequestEvent). PR-only stats (additions, deletions, commits, merged) are null on non-PR rows.

💡 Use cases

• Weekly dev-summary agent — run repo mode with since: <7 days ago> on a watched repo; let an LLM turn the commits/PRs/releases into a shipped-this-week digest.
• Release tracking — watch releases for a dependency org (kubernetes, vercel), alert on new versions and draft upgrade notes from the release bodies.
• Security-commit detection — filter commit/PR title for security|cve|vuln|fix|patch to surface security work before it hits an advisory feed.
• Dependency-health scoring — pull issue counts, label distribution and PR merge velocity to score a repo's maintenance health before you adopt it.
• Contributor monitoring — track a key maintainer's public events (user mode) to spot activity shifts or bus-factor risk.
• Org-wide radar — scan an entire org's repos (org mode) for recent activity to map where the work is actually happening.
• RAG over dev activity — embed commit messages and PR titles into a vector store and answer "when did X get fixed?" with citations to the exact commit.

👥 Who uses it

AI-agent & LLM builders grounding coding/DevOps agents · platform & DevRel teams tracking ecosystem activity · dependency-security and supply-chain analysts · release managers and upgrade-planning teams · open-source maintainers and community managers · data teams building developer-intelligence dashboards and RAG pipelines.

💰 Pricing

This Actor runs on a simple pay-per-result model — you pay per saved activity event, with no separate Apify platform fees to calculate. Runs that yield zero events (deleted, empty or private repo) are free. Try it on the free tier first, then scale up. See the Pricing tab on this page for the current per-result rate.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Is it legal to scrape GitHub activity? This Actor only reads publicly available data through GitHub's public REST API — the same activity anyone can browse on github.com. You are responsible for using the data in line with GitHub's Terms of Service and applicable laws.

Does GitHub have a public API — why use this instead? GitHub does have a public REST API, but each object type (commits, PRs, issues, releases, events) is a separate endpoint with its own pagination, schema and rate limits, and the keyless limit is only 60 requests/hour/IP. This Actor is a GitHub activity API alternative that merges all types into one normalized schema, handles pagination and backoff, and rotates proxy IPs — so you get a single clean event stream instead of stitching endpoints together yourself.

What about rate limits? Keyless GitHub is 60 requests/hour/IP. The Actor routes every request through the Apify datacenter proxy, rotating the source IP to effectively spread that cap, and it backs off and retries on 403s. For org-wide scans or frequent runs, supply a free ghToken to raise the limit to 5000 req/hr.

Can I run it without an API key or token? Yes — that is the default. No GitHub account, login or API key is required; keyless mode plus proxy IP rotation covers monitoring a handful of repos. The optional ghToken is purely a throughput booster for heavy workloads.

How do I export the data to CSV or JSON? Run the Actor, then export the resulting dataset as CSV, JSON, Excel or XML from the Apify Console — or pull it programmatically via the Apify API and dataset endpoints.

How much data can I get in one run? Thousands of events. Big repos yield hundreds of commits/PRs alone; org mode multiplies that across up to maxOrgRepos repos. Commits, issues and PRs go as far back as maxPerType and since allow; releases return all of them.

How far back can I go? Commits, issues and PRs: as far as repo history goes, capped by maxPerType. Releases: all of them. User events are limited by GitHub itself to the last ~90 days of public activity (10 pages max).

Why don't commit rows have additions/deletions? GitHub's /commits list endpoint doesn't return per-commit line stats — only the detail endpoint does, and fetching each commit's detail would multiply requests heavily. Pull-request rows do carry additions, deletions and commits straight from the PR object; for per-commit stats, post-process by fetching the specific commit URLs.

Does it work for private repos? No — it targets public monitoring using unauthenticated public endpoints (or a token's public scope). Private-repo access would require a token with full repo scope, which is outside this Actor's design.

Can AI agents call this directly? Yes — that's the primary design target. Wrap it in an MCP server or Apify tool integration; the agent passes a repo and a time window and receives normalized activity, with no GitHub API juggling or rate-limit handling on the agent side.

🔗 More developer & AI-intelligence scrapers by logiover

Building a developer-intelligence or AI-agent grounding stack? Pair GitHub Activity Stream with the rest of the suite:

Focus	Actor
🐙 GitHub repos	GitHub Repository Scraper
📦 npm packages	npm Package Intelligence Scraper
🤗 AI models	Hugging Face Hub Intelligence Scraper
🛡️ Security	CVE Security Advisory Monitor
📄 Research papers	arXiv Paper Scraper · Semantic Scholar Research Scraper
🏢 Company intel	Company Deep Research Scraper
📰 News	News Intelligence Scraper · Google News Scraper
📚 Docs & KB	Docs Knowledge Base Scraper
🔎 Web research	AI Deep Research · AI Web Search
💬 Discussions	Discussion Intelligence Scraper

👉 Browse all logiover scrapers on Apify Store — 180+ actors across real estate, jobs, crypto, social media & B2B data.

⏰ Scheduling & integration

Schedule this Actor on Apify to monitor dev activity daily or weekly — set since to your interval for clean delta runs. Export results to JSON, CSV or Excel, sync to Google Sheets, or push to your database, BI tools and webhooks through the Apify API. Wrap it in an MCP server so AI agents can call it as a tool, or connect it to Make, n8n or Zapier to build automated release-alert and dependency-monitoring pipelines.

⭐ Support & feedback

Found a bug or need an extra field? Open an issue on the Issues tab — response is usually fast. If this Actor saves you time, a ★★★★★ review on the Store page genuinely helps and is hugely appreciated. 🙏

⚖️ Legal

This Actor queries the public GitHub REST API (keyless, or with a user-supplied token) and extracts only publicly available data. Activity data is owned by the respective repository owners and contributors. Use it for legitimate dev monitoring, dependency tracking, release intelligence and AI-agent grounding, and comply with GitHub's Terms of Service and any applicable local laws.

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📝 Changelog

2026-07-06

• ✨ README overhaul: richer output sample, ready-to-run example scenarios, cross-promo links to related logiover scrapers, and clearer quick-start.

2026-07-02 — v1.0

• Initial release.
• 4 modes: repo, org, user, bulk.
• 4 event types: commits, pulls, issues, releases (+ user public events).
• since time window, pagination, maxPerType / maxOrgRepos caps.
• Optional ghToken (60→5000 req/hr).
• Apify datacenter proxy default (IP rotation).
• Pay-per-result (result event per saved event).