Frequently asked questions
The questions we get asked most about inclusion rules, data sourcing, and how the leaderboards are calculated.
Which repos get included?
Public GitHub repositories with more than 500 stars that have also been pushed to recently. Both conditions matter — a repo with plenty of stars but no recent activity, or one that's active but under the star threshold, won't show up on the main leaderboard. We never delete data though: repos that drop below the threshold get flagged with a status and keep their history.
How often is the data refreshed?
A full sync runs once a day, rescanning every repo that meets the threshold. A lightweight rising-stars scan runs every 4 hours on top of that, catching new repos that may not have hit the star threshold yet. Trending deltas are calculated from daily snapshots.
Where does the data come from?
100% from the official GitHub REST / Search API — no HTML scraping, no third-party mirrors or caches.
Is this an official GitHub service?
No. This is an independent third-party project with no affiliation, partnership, or endorsement from GitHub, Inc. It only reads data through GitHub's public API.
What's the relationship with git-stars.org?
This is an independent rebuild. Its information architecture — sorting by language/topic/owner, a rising-stars view, and similar functional design — was inspired by git-stars.org, credited here with thanks. It isn't affiliated with or endorsed by it, and the data pipeline, code, and visual design are all built independently.
Why do the star counts here differ slightly from GitHub itself?
What you see here is the number from our most recent sync; GitHub's own site is live. The gap is at most one sync cycle — usually under a day — and that's expected, not a data error.
How is the rising-stars leaderboard calculated?
It filters by creation date (repos created in the last 7 / 15 / 30 / 60 / 90 days) and ranks the top 100 by stars, with a very low star floor (≥5) so unproven repos can surface early. The 90-day window is something we added beyond what git-stars offers, for a longer view.
How does trending work, and why does it sometimes show a countdown?
Trending is calculated from daily snapshots — daily deltas need 2 days of history, weekly deltas need 8. Until enough history has accumulated, we show an honest countdown page instead of a leaderboard we can't back up yet; it switches over automatically once unlocked.
What's the difference between New Gen and Rising?
Rising uses a rolling window based on creation date that keeps moving forward. New Gen uses a fixed cutoff — every indexed repo created since 2023 (roughly when the post-ChatGPT wave of open-source activity took off) — a much larger, stable set for looking at this generation's ecosystem as a whole.
Can I rely on these numbers for anything important?
We wouldn't recommend it. We don't guarantee real-time accuracy or completeness, and the underlying Search API has hard result caps that can, in edge cases, prevent a fully exhaustive count for a very crowded star range. For anything that matters, check GitHub directly.
The owner ranking only goes a few hundred pages deep — where did the rest go?
The owner ranking shows only the top 5,000 accounts by total stars (about 167 pages at our page size). Nobody's data is deleted — accounts beyond that cutoff just aren't paginated into the ranking list, since thousands of pages nobody would ever scroll to isn't useful navigation.