GitHub Repo Search & Stats: Stars, Topics, Releases

Search GitHub repositories, or look up a list of them, and get clean rows from the official GitHub API:

• Search with GitHub's own syntax: topic:web-scraping stars:>500, "vector database" language:rust, created:>2026-01-01 stars:>100, sorted by stars, forks, recent updates or best match
• Look up a list of repositories (owner/name or GitHub links)
• Per repo: stars, forks, open issues, language, topics, license, homepage, owner and owner type (user or organization), created / updated / last push dates, archived, fork, size
• Optional details: latest release (tag and date), contributor count, language breakdown in %, and the README text

Who it's for

• Developer-tool founders and DevRel: track your project and competitors, find adjacent projects.
• Investors and analysts: spot fast-growing open-source projects in a category.
• Researchers: datasets of repositories by topic, language and activity.
• AI pipelines: READMEs of the top repos in a field as context.

Input

Option	Default	What it does
What to get	Search	Search or look up specific repos
Search: queries	–	GitHub search syntax, one per line
Search: sort by	Stars	Stars, forks, recently updated, best match
Search: max repos per query	100	Up to 1,000 (GitHub's limit per query)
Look up: repositories	–	owner/name or links
Include release, contributors and languages	off	3 extra requests per repo
Include README	off	1 extra request per repo
GitHub token	–	Optional, raises the limits (stored encrypted)

Output

A real lookup:

{
  "status": "ok",
  "fullName": "apify/crawlee",
  "url": "https://github.com/apify/crawlee",
  "stars": 25979,
  "language": "TypeScript",
  "license": "Apache-2.0",
  "ownerType": "Organization",
  "latestRelease": { "tag": "v3.18.2", "name": "v3.18.2", "publishedAt": "2026-09-29T09:58:35Z" },
  "contributors": 151,
  "languages": { "TypeScript": 62.1, "MDX": 31, "JavaScript": 5.4, "CSS": 0.9, "Dockerfile": 0.7 }
}

Limits (GitHub's), honestly

• Search returns at most 1,000 repositories per query. Split big searches by stars, language or creation date to go further.
• Without a token: 10 searches per minute and 60 detail requests per hour. The tool waits for the limit window automatically, but details for many repos need a token (free, no scopes needed).
• Public repositories only. No user profiles, emails or followers: this is about repositories.

Use it from your AI agent (MCP)

Claude, Cursor and other MCP clients can call this tool directly through Apify's MCP server. Add it as an MCP server / connector:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=swiftkit/github-repos",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer <YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" }
    }
  }
}

Then just ask, for example: "Find the 20 most-starred Rust vector database repositories updated this year". Each call is billed like a normal run.

Pricing

You pay per repository row. Errors and not-found repos are free. See the Pricing tab.

More tools from SwiftKit

• Hacker News Scraper: what developers are discussing, Show HN launches, hiring threads
• Tech Stack Detector: what websites are built with
• Website to Markdown for AI: clean page content for LLMs

Questions?

Open an issue on the Issues tab.