GitLab Projects Scraper 🦊

Scrape GitLab projects at scale — stars, forks, topics, visibility, activity dates and full metadata — with no API key for public repos. Search GitLab by keyword or pull exact repositories by group/path or numeric id, and export clean structured data to JSON, CSV, Excel, or the Apify API.

Built for developers, data teams, DevRel, recruiters and market researchers who need GitLab repository intelligence without wrestling the REST API, pagination, or URL-encoding.

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✨ What it does

• 🔍 Search mode — search all public GitLab projects for a keyword and get results sorted by star count (descending).
• 🎯 Projects mode — fetch full detail for specific repos by group/path (e.g. gitlab-org/gitlab) or numeric id. Namespace paths are URL-encoded for you.
• ⭐ Rich fields — stars, forks, topics, description, visibility, last activity & creation timestamps, web URL.
• 🚫 No API key required for public projects. Runs fine on datacenter proxies.
• 📦 Clean output — one row per project, ready for JSON / CSV / Excel / Google Sheets.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	select	search (query, sorted by stars) or projects (ids or group/path).
query	string	Keyword for search mode. Prefilled with kubernetes.
projects	array	Repo refs for projects mode, e.g. ["gitlab-org/gitlab","fdroid/fdroidclient"].
maxItems	integer	Cap on returned projects (1–1000, default 100).

Example input

{
  "mode": "search",
  "query": "kubernetes",
  "maxItems": 100
}

{
  "mode": "projects",
  "projects": ["gitlab-org/gitlab", "fdroid/fdroidclient"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

📤 Output

Each dataset item:

{
  "id": 278964,
  "name": "GitLab",
  "full_name": "GitLab.org / GitLab",
  "path": "gitlab-org/gitlab",
  "description": "GitLab is an open source end-to-end software development platform.",
  "web_url": "https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab",
  "stars": 6064,
  "forks": 12215,
  "topics": ["devops", "ci-cd", "git"],
  "visibility": "public",
  "last_activity_at": "2026-07-01T10:00:00.000Z",
  "created_at": "2011-01-01T00:00:00.000Z",
  "url": "https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-03T01:00:00Z"
}

💡 Use cases

• Competitive & market research — track the most-starred projects in a topic (kubernetes, terraform, rust…).
• Developer lead generation — find active open-source projects and the teams behind them.
• DevRel & community — monitor forks, stars, and activity on your ecosystem's repos.
• Data science — build datasets of open-source activity across GitLab.
• Due diligence — snapshot a project's popularity and maintenance signals.

💰 Pricing

Pay-as-you-go, roughly ~$1 per 1,000 projects scraped (input + output). GitLab's public API is free, so your cost is essentially Apify compute + a small per-result margin. A 100-project run costs pennies. See the live pricing on the actor page.

⚙️ How it works

The actor calls the GitLab REST API v4 (https://gitlab.com/api/v4). Requests use curl_cffi with Chrome browser impersonation (great on datacenter IPs) and fall back to the standard library automatically. Search paginates by star count; detail lookups URL-encode group/path refs. Runs are async and batched (≤50) for speed, and fail loudly if zero projects come back.

📊 Comparison

	This actor	Manual API scripts	Generic web scrapers
No API key (public)	✅	✅	⚠️
Sorted-by-stars search	✅	⚠️ manual	❌
group/path encoding	✅ auto	⚠️ manual	❌
Clean structured export	✅	❌	⚠️
Pagination handled	✅	❌	⚠️

🔗 Related actors

• GitHub Scraper
• npm Package Scraper
• Docker Hub Scraper
• Stack Overflow Scraper

🛟 Support

Questions, bugs, or a field you want added? Open an issue on the actor page or contact us through Apify — we usually reply within a day.

🔎 Keywords

gitlab scraper, gitlab api, gitlab projects, scrape gitlab, gitlab stars, gitlab forks, gitlab topics, repository scraper, open source data, devops data, git repositories, gitlab search, gitlab metadata, project popularity, gitlab crawler