GitHub Repo Search — Stars, Language & Topics

Search GitHub repositories by keyword, language, topic, stars, and date. Returns structured JSON with repository metadata including stars, forks, watchers, topics, license, and activity timestamps. No login or API token required (optional token for higher rate limits).

Free-plan limit: Apify free-plan users receive at most 5 repository records per run. Paid and agentic-payment runs may use the configured maxResults value.

Features

• Full-text search — Search across repository names, descriptions, and READMEs
• Structured filters — Filter by programming language, GitHub topics, owner/org, star range, fork count, license, creation date, and last push date
• Direct repo lookup — Fetch metadata for specific repositories by URL (bypasses search)
• Sort options — Sort by stars, forks, recent activity, or GitHub best-match
• No API token required — Works with unauthenticated GitHub API access (10 search requests/min). Add a token for 30 search requests/min and 5000 req/hr
• Clean, flat output — One consistent record shape for every repository
• Smart rate-limit handling — Automatically waits and retries on rate limit, with graceful degradation
• MCP-optimized — Semantic field names and structured output ready for AI agent consumption

Use Cases

• Developer-tool market research — Find popular libraries in a language, sorted by stars
• Dependency & ecosystem tracking — Map projects using a specific framework or library
• Trending discovery — Find new repos created recently, ranked by stars
• Lead generation — Identify maintainers and organizations active in a topic
• OSS intelligence — Track repository growth, activity, and licensing
• AI training datasets — Build large structured repository datasets

Input

Field	Type	Description	Default
searchQuery	string	Keywords to search repo names, descriptions, and READMEs	"web scraping"
language	string	Filter by programming language (python, typescript, rust, etc.)	"" (all)
topic	string	Filter by GitHub topics (comma-separated, all must match)	""
userOrg	string	Restrict to a user or organization login	""
minStars	integer	Minimum star count	0
maxStars	integer	Maximum star count	"" (no limit)
minForks	integer	Minimum fork count	0
license	select	Filter by license (mit, apache-2.0, gpl-3.0, etc.)	"any"
createdAfter	string	Repos created on or after this date (YYYY-MM-DD)	""
pushedAfter	string	Repos pushed on or after this date (YYYY-MM-DD)	""
excludeForks	boolean	Skip forked repositories	true
excludeArchived	boolean	Skip archived repositories	true
sort	select	Sort by: stars, forks, updated, best-match	"stars"
order	select	Sort direction: desc or asc	"desc"
startRepoUrls	array	Direct repo URLs to fetch (bypasses search)	[]
maxResults	integer	Maximum repositories to return (free-plan runs are capped at 5; paid and agentic-payment runs can use up to 1000)	100
githubToken	string	Optional GitHub token for higher rate limits	""

Quick Start

Search for popular Python web scraping libraries:

{
    "searchQuery": "web scraping",
    "language": "python",
    "minStars": 100,
    "sort": "stars",
    "maxResults": 50
}

Find trending TypeScript repos from 2025:

{
    "searchQuery": "",
    "language": "typescript",
    "createdAfter": "2025-01-01",
    "minStars": 50,
    "sort": "stars",
    "maxResults": 100
}

Fetch specific repositories by URL:

{
    "startRepoUrls": [
        "https://github.com/facebook/react",
        "https://github.com/vuejs/vue",
        "https://github.com/angular/angular"
    ],
    "maxResults": 3
}

Output

Each dataset record contains:

Field	Type	Description
repoName	string	Repository name without owner prefix
fullName	string	Full name as owner/repo
description	string|null	Repository description
url	string	GitHub HTML URL
owner	string	Owner login (user or org)
ownerType	string	"User" or "Organization"
ownerUrl	string	Owner's GitHub profile URL
stars	number	Star count (stargazers)
forks	number	Fork count
watchers	number	Subscriber count
openIssues	number	Open issues + PRs count
language	string|null	Primary programming language
topics	string[]	GitHub topic tags
license	string|null	SPDX license key
licenseName	string|null	Full license name
isArchived	boolean	Whether repo is archived
isFork	boolean	Whether repo is a fork
homepage	string|null	External homepage URL
defaultBranch	string	Default branch name
sizeKb	number	Repository size in KB
createdAt	string	ISO 8601 creation timestamp
updatedAt	string	ISO 8601 last metadata update
pushedAt	string	ISO 8601 last push timestamp
hasWiki	boolean	Wiki enabled
hasDiscussions	boolean	Discussions enabled
totalResults	number	Total matching repos on GitHub
incompleteResults	boolean	Whether GitHub truncated results
scrapedAt	string	ISO 8601 extraction timestamp
sourceUrl	string	API URL that produced this record

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing. These are the current Apify Store event prices:

Event	Price (USD)	When it is charged
result-item	$0.001	Repository Result — Single repository record in the default dataset. Includes repo metadata: name, stars, forks, language, topics, license, and timestamps.
apify-actor-start	$0.00005	Actor Start — Charged when the Actor starts running. Number of events charged depends on Actor memory (one event per GB, minimum one event). — Charged once per run.

Apify platform usage for this Actor run is included alongside the event prices above; no separate per-run platform-usage fee is passed to users.

This covers Apify platform usage for this Actor run. Other Apify products or usage outside this Actor run may still follow your account plan.

Rate Limits

GitHub's REST API enforces rate limits:

Mode	Search requests	Core requests
Unauthenticated	10/min	60/hr
With token	30/min	5,000/hr

The actor automatically:

• Detects rate-limit responses (HTTP 403 with x-ratelimit-remaining: 0)
• Calculates the wait time from the x-ratelimit-reset header
• Waits and retries the same page
• Adds appropriate delays between page requests (2.1s with token, 6.2s without)

Getting a GitHub Token (Optional)

1. Go to github.com/settings/tokens
2. Generate a new token (classic)
3. No scopes needed for public repository data
4. Paste the token into the githubToken input field

Your token is used only to call the GitHub API and is never stored.

Export & Integration

Export scraped data, run the scraper via API, schedule and monitor runs, or integrate with other tools. Results are available as JSON, CSV, Excel, or via the Apify API.

Notes

• GitHub caps any single search at 1,000 results. Use multiple queries with different filters for broader coverage.
• The incompleteResults field indicates if GitHub's search timed out — some matching repos may be missing.
• The totalResults field shows how many total repos match the query on GitHub (may be much larger than the number returned).