GitHub Trending Repos Tracker

Track the GitHub repositories getting the most stars right now — daily, weekly, or monthly, filtered by programming language. Scrapes github.com/trending and returns clean JSON with stars, forks, language, description, and (optionally) README content for LLM/RAG workflows.

What does GitHub Trending Repos Tracker do?

GitHub's /trending page is a hand-curated discovery feed for repos gaining stars fastest. The page itself is not in the official GitHub REST API — and that's exactly the gap this Actor fills. Get the trending list:

• Filtered by programming language (TypeScript, Go, Rust, Python, anything GitHub supports)
• Filtered by timespan (today, this week, this month)
• Optionally with the full README, topics, license, homepage — pulled from the GitHub API in one pass

Schedule it daily, hit it from your CRM/Slack/Notion, ingest into your RAG pipeline for "what's new this week" digests.

Why use this Actor?

• VCs and scouts — spot fast-growing OSS projects before TechCrunch does
• Content creators — automate "Top 10 X repos of the week" newsletters and threads
• Devs / engineers — discover libraries in a language you care about, weekly
• AI/RAG pipelines — feed README content into LLM training/retrieval workflows
• Investors — track GitHub momentum signals for crypto/dev-tool startups

How to use it

1. Click Try for free
2. (Optional) Set a programming language like typescript or rust. Leave blank for all.
3. Pick a timespan — today, this week, or this month
4. Toggle Include README if you want full markdown content per repo
5. Click Start — results appear in seconds
6. Download as JSON, CSV, Excel, or hit the API

Input

Field	Required	Default	Description
language	No	"" (all)	GitHub language slug — typescript, python, go, etc.
timespan	No	daily	daily, weekly, or monthly
spokenLanguage	No	""	ISO 639-1 code (en, zh, ja) to filter by README language
includeReadme	No	false	Fetch README + topics + license from GitHub API
proxyConfiguration	No	Apify proxy	Standard proxy options — defaults work fine

Output

{
  "rank": 1,
  "owner": "openai",
  "name": "codex",
  "fullName": "openai/codex",
  "url": "https://github.com/openai/codex",
  "description": "Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal",
  "language": "Rust",
  "languageColor": "#dea584",
  "stars": 18432,
  "starsInPeriod": 723,
  "forks": 1654,
  "builtBy": [
    { "username": "rasbt", "avatarUrl": "https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/..." }
  ],
  "topics": ["llm", "coding-agent", "terminal", "ai"],
  "license": "MIT",
  "homepage": "https://codex.openai.com",
  "defaultBranch": "main",
  "openIssues": 42,
  "watchers": 184,
  "readmeMarkdown": "# Codex\n\nLightweight coding agent...",
  "timespan": "daily",
  "languageFilter": null,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-26T20:14:00.000Z"
}

Download as JSON, CSV, HTML, or Excel from the dataset.

Data table

Field	Type	Description
rank	number	Position on trending page (1-25)
fullName	string	owner/name
url	string	Repo URL
description	string	Short description from repo
language	string	Primary language
stars	number	Total stars
starsInPeriod	number	New stars in selected timespan
forks	number	Total forks
builtBy	array	Top contributors shown on trending page
topics	array	Topic tags (only if includeReadme: true)
license	string	SPDX license identifier (only if includeReadme: true)
homepage	string	Project homepage URL (only if includeReadme: true)
readmeMarkdown	string	Full README in markdown (only if includeReadme: true)

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing. You pay only per trending repo returned.

Event	Description	Price
trending_repo	One repo extracted from the trending page	$0.002 per repo

GitHub's trending page typically returns ~25 repos per run. So a single run costs ~$0.05.

Cost estimates

• 1 run (daily, all languages): 25 repos = **$0.05**
• 1 run (daily, includeReadme = true): same 25 repos = ~$0.05 (READMEs are free via GitHub API)
• 30 days of daily runs: ~$1.50/month
• Apify free tier ($5/month credit) covers ~100 runs/month

Tips

• Schedule it daily at midnight UTC to capture the full day's trending
• Use language=typescript&timespan=weekly for "what's hot in TS this week" workflows
• Set includeReadme: true to pipe straight into a RAG/embedding store
• GitHub's unauthenticated API limits to 60 requests/hour. With includeReadme: true and 25 repos, one run uses ~50 API calls — well within limits. For higher volume, set GITHUB_TOKEN env var on the run.

FAQ

Why scrape instead of use the GitHub API? The trending list is not exposed via the official API. This Actor closes that gap by parsing the public trending HTML.

Is this legal? GitHub's trending page is public. This Actor only fetches what any browser can fetch and respects rate limits. The scraped data is used per buyer; the buyer is responsible for compliance with their use case.

Does it work on free-tier Apify proxies? Yes. GitHub doesn't block datacenter IPs.

Can I use this for a daily newsletter / scheduled digest? Exactly the use case. Schedule the Actor via Apify Console → run → ingest the dataset into your workflow.

Issues / feature requests? Open them on the Issues tab. Planned: language-pair trending, GitHub Awesome lists ingestion, GitHub Sponsors signals.