GitHub recently brought back an easy way to access the star history of your favorite projects through a new, dedicated endpoint, solving a previous access restriction. Anyone can now see how an open-source project's popularity has grown over time.
Hey tech enthusiasts! Have you noticed GitHub star history seemed to disappear for a while? We have some fantastic news: it's back, and better than ever! GitHub launched an entirely new star history endpoint last September, which means you can once again easily track the popularity of any public GitHub repository.
For you as developers, or even just curious onlookers, this means the tools you relied on to see how a project gained stars are working correctly again, even better. GitHub had previously limited the display of the stargazers list to repo admins and collaborators only, rendering many star history tools useless. But with this new endpoint, everything is back on track.
So, what exactly is new? This new endpoint, 'GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/stargazers/history', is specifically designed for tracking star history. It works for any public repo without requiring any authentication – which is awesome! It returns stars grouped by calendar week, starting with the newest. For instance, you might see data like: '[{ "week": 1754784000, "total": 19, "days": [0, 12, 7, 0, 0, 0, 0] }]', where 'days' represents stars per day of that week, starting on Sunday.
And what about its accuracy? It has been thoroughly tested, and the weekly star totals matched the actual star count exactly in all seven repos checked, including massive projects like 'vercel/next.js' and 'torvalds/linux'. It's also smart enough to follow renamed repos; for example, 'facebook/react' returns the complete star history of 'react/react'.
For older projects, don't worry. You can fetch up to 100 pages of data, with each page holding up to 30 weeks of star history. This means you can track star history for projects going back many years. The fetched results are cached for an hour to speed up access.
Previously, attempts to get this data from other sources, like the public GitHub Archive data, ran into issues, especially with renamed repos, which would lose a significant portion of their star history. But with this new endpoint, that problem is a thing of the past. This is a great step by GitHub to make tracking project growth easier and to make this data available to the community as a whole. Get ready to chart your favorite projects' stars!
For you as developers, or even just curious onlookers, this means the tools you relied on to see how a project gained stars are working correctly again, even better. GitHub had previously limited the display of the stargazers list to repo admins and collaborators only, rendering many star history tools useless. But with this new endpoint, everything is back on track.
So, what exactly is new? This new endpoint, 'GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/stargazers/history', is specifically designed for tracking star history. It works for any public repo without requiring any authentication – which is awesome! It returns stars grouped by calendar week, starting with the newest. For instance, you might see data like: '[{ "week": 1754784000, "total": 19, "days": [0, 12, 7, 0, 0, 0, 0] }]', where 'days' represents stars per day of that week, starting on Sunday.
And what about its accuracy? It has been thoroughly tested, and the weekly star totals matched the actual star count exactly in all seven repos checked, including massive projects like 'vercel/next.js' and 'torvalds/linux'. It's also smart enough to follow renamed repos; for example, 'facebook/react' returns the complete star history of 'react/react'.
For older projects, don't worry. You can fetch up to 100 pages of data, with each page holding up to 30 weeks of star history. This means you can track star history for projects going back many years. The fetched results are cached for an hour to speed up access.
Previously, attempts to get this data from other sources, like the public GitHub Archive data, ran into issues, especially with renamed repos, which would lose a significant portion of their star history. But with this new endpoint, that problem is a thing of the past. This is a great step by GitHub to make tracking project growth easier and to make this data available to the community as a whole. Get ready to chart your favorite projects' stars!
