GitHub Repo Scraper: Releases, Contributors, Issues & README

Paste repo names or a GitHub search and get back one complete row per repository: popularity, stack, license, how often it ships, who builds it, what users are asking about, and what the README says.

Launch Sale: 90% OFF for the first week! Every price below is cut by 90% during launch week, and you still pay only for results that come back.

Quick start

Press Start. The sample enriches apify/crawlee-python and pallets/flask in a few seconds without any token. Add your own repos, or type a search like topic:vector-database stars:>1000.

What you get

• Stars, forks, watchers, open issues, primary language and language breakdown (%), topics, license, homepage, created and last-push dates, archived and fork flags
• Latest releases with tag, date, prerelease flag, notes excerpt, plus average days between releases
• Top contributors with commit counts and profile links
• Samples of the most recently active open issues and open pull requests, with labels and comment counts
• README excerpt, its headings and its outbound links
• A 0-100 activity score from push recency, release habit, contributor count and stars
• Status rows for invalid, missing or rate-limited repos, which are never charged

Good for

• Vetting open-source dependencies before you adopt them
• Competitive tracking of rival SDKs and developer tools
• Finding maintainers and active contributors for developer-relations outreach
• Market maps of a technology category (search by topic, sort by stars)

Pricing

Launch Sale: 90% OFF for the first week!

• $0.004 per repository enriched — $4 per 1,000
• Missing, private and rate-limited repos are free
• The sample run (2 repos) costs $0.008

You pay only for results that come back. Status rows (not found, errors, skipped) are free. Set a max cost per run in the run options and the run stops cleanly when it hits it. Normal Apify platform usage applies.

Input

Field	What it does
repositories	owner/name or a github.com URL, one per line. Example: apify/crawlee-python
searchQuery	GitHub repository search syntax, sorted by stars. Example: topic:rag language:python stars:>500
maxSearchResults	How many top search results to enrich.
maxReleases	Latest releases to include (with notes excerpt). Also used for release cadence.
maxContributors	Top contributors by commit count, with profile links.
maxIssues	Most recently updated open issues and open pull requests (each).
readmeMaxChars	How much README text to keep. Headings and links are always extracted. 0 skips the README.
githubToken	Without a token GitHub allows about 60 API calls per hour (roughly 10 repos). A free fine-grained token with no scopes raises that to 5,000.

Output

Results go to the default dataset (table view in the Console, or JSON/CSV/Excel export). A RUN_SUMMARY.json record in the key-value store has counts, failures and the prices used.

Limits

• Public repositories only. Uses the official GitHub REST API.
• Without a token GitHub allows ~60 calls/hour per IP (about 10 repos). Add a token for bigger lists; it is stored as a secret.
• Contributor lists for very large repos are GitHub's cached top contributors.
• All collection is done by this actor directly against public sources. It never calls other paid actors.

Run it from code

Same input as the Console sample:

{
  "repositories": [
    "apify/crawlee-python",
    "pallets/flask"
  ]
}

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/physealabs~github-repo-intelligence/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d @input.json

from apify_client import ApifyClient
items = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN").actor("physealabs/github-repo-intelligence").call(run_input={"repositories": ["apify/crawlee-python", "pallets/flask"]})

It also works from Zapier, Make, n8n and Apify schedules.

About

Built by Physea Labs · Liminal, the team behind Liminal, a router that turns hard questions into grounded, checkable answers. Questions or a source you want added? Open an issue on the actor page.