🔥 GitHub Trending Scraper: Daily, Weekly & Monthly

Overview

GitHub Trending has no official API. GitHub's REST and GraphQL APIs cover repos, users, issues, and releases, but not the trending page. This actor reads github.com/trending directly by language and time window, and returns clean structured JSON: rank, repo, description, language, total stars, forks, and stars gained in the window.

Built lean and HTTP-only (plain fetch and HTML parse, no browser needed since the page is server-rendered). Ideal for OSS landscape monitoring, DevRel newsletters, competitive scans, and AI agents that need the trending signal.

Reliability posture: blocked, empty, or failed runs are never charged. If the trending page fails to load or zero repos parse, the run ends with a diagnostic record and nothing is billed.

✅ No login | ✅ No API needed | ✅ Server-rendered, fast | ✅ MCP-ready for AI agents

Features

Filter by language (javascript, python, go, rust, etc.) or leave empty for all. Pick the time window: daily, weekly, or monthly. Filter by spoken language via spokenLanguageCode if you want (say) only Chinese-language repos. Rank plus stars gained in the window for a clean rising-repo signal. Same output whether you consume it via CSV, JSON, Excel, API, or MCP tool call.

How it works

The github.com/trending page is server-rendered HTML with a stable structure. This actor fetches the page for the chosen language and window, parses the trending list, and returns one flat record per repo. Because there is no browser and no proxy needed, runs finish in seconds.

The record shape mirrors what a maintainer would care about: total stars for context, stars gained for momentum, plus language and description so you can filter by category downstream.

🧾 Input configuration

{
  "language": "python",
  "since": "daily",
  "spokenLanguageCode": null
}

📤 Output format

This is a real record captured from a live run (language: "python", since: "daily"):

{
  "rank": 2,
  "owner": "virattt",
  "repo": "ai-hedge-fund",
  "fullName": "virattt/ai-hedge-fund",
  "url": "https://github.com/virattt/ai-hedge-fund",
  "description": "An AI Hedge Fund Team",
  "language": "Python",
  "stars": 61946,
  "forks": 10918,
  "starsGained": 109,
  "since": "daily",
  "charged": false,
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-15T04:16:24.037Z"
}

Every trending repo record contains these fields:

Field	Description
🏆 rank	Position on the trending page
👤 owner	Repo owner
📦 repo	Repo name
🏷️ fullName	owner/repo
🔗 url	Canonical GitHub URL
📝 description	Repo description
🗣️ language	Primary language
⭐ stars	Total stars
🍴 forks	Total forks
📈 starsGained	Stars gained in the selected window
🕐 since	Time window used (daily, weekly, monthly)
💰 charged	Whether the pay-per-event charge for this record went through
🕒 scraped_at	ISO timestamp of capture

💼 Common use cases

OSS landscape scans See what is breaking out in your language or ecosystem before it hits Hacker News. Feed the data into a competitive dashboard alongside your own repo stats.

Newsletters and DevRel Build a "top rising repos" newsletter section on autopilot. Curate weekly language-specific trending picks for your community.

Investor and VC scouting Track early technical momentum in emerging categories (AI agents, RAG, WASM). Flag OSS breakouts inside portfolio company categories.

AI research agents Give an agent live trending data so it can answer "what's hot in Rust today?" Wire the MCP tool into Claude or ChatGPT for weekly OSS reports.

🚀 Getting started

1. Open the actor and optionally set a language filter (leave empty for all).
2. Pick since: daily, weekly, or monthly.
3. Optionally set spokenLanguageCode to slice by spoken language.
4. Click Start, then download the dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel, or pull it via API or MCP.

FAQ

Why not just call the GitHub API? GitHub does not expose the trending page via API. This actor is the only way to get trending data programmatically without scraping HTML yourself.

How often does the trending page update? GitHub refreshes the page frequently through the day. Schedule a run every few hours for a fresh trending feed.

Can I use it inside an AI agent? Yes. It is exposed as an MCP tool. See below.

How much does it cost? $2 per 1,000 trending repos delivered. You pay only for repos actually returned. There is no free tier.

Use in Claude, ChatGPT & any MCP agent

https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=themineworks/github-trending-scraper

Or call it programmatically with the Apify client:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('themineworks/github-trending-scraper').call({
  language: 'python',
  since: 'daily',
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

🛠️ Complete your OSS intelligence pipeline

Pair this actor with the rest of the themineworks GitHub suite:

• GitHub Repo Intelligence: pull deep metadata (stars, contributors, README, releases) for the trending picks.
• GitHub Skill & Memory Discovery: find every SKILL.md, CLAUDE.md, and AGENTS.md file for a domain.
• RAG Website Crawler: turn any project's docs site into embedding-ready Markdown.

Typical flow: github-trending-scraper surfaces the momentum, github-repo-intelligence goes deep on the interesting ones, rag-crawler ingests their docs for an AI copilot.

Questions or need a custom field set? Reach out through the Apify profile.