5 Ways to Keep Track of Trending Repositories on GitHub

As a developer, keeping up with the latest trends in open-source software is an essential part of advancing your skills and knowledge. With millions of repositories on GitHub, though, it can be overwhelming to try to identify which projects are currently generating the most buzz and momentum.

Enter the GitHub trending page – a constantly-updated list of the repositories that have earned the most new stars on GitHub over the past day, week, or month. Monitoring the trending page is a great way to surface exciting new tools, frameworks, and projects that are capturing the attention of the developer community.

In this post, we‘ll take a closer look at five different ways you can track and stay on top of GitHub trends – from official GitHub newsletters to third-party apps and websites. We‘ll evaluate the pros and cons of each approach to help you find the best methods for your needs and preferences. Let‘s dive in!

Why Track GitHub Trends?

Before we explore how to track GitHub trends, let‘s discuss why it‘s so valuable for developers to do so:

1. Discover innovative new tools and projects. Following GitHub trends surfaces up-and-coming repositories that are rapidly gaining traction. It‘s a great way to find new open-source libraries, frameworks, tools, and applications that could boost your own development work. Trending repos often represent the latest advancements in their respective domains.

2. Stay current on best practices and industry standards. The open-source projects that become trends on GitHub frequently do so because they introduce novel approaches or present a fresh take on established conventions. Tracking trending repos helps you stay apprised of evolving best practices, design patterns, and technologies so your skills don‘t fall behind.

3. Find opportunities to learn and collaborate. Popular open-source projects attract a lot of attention and contributor activity. This makes them great for discovering active communities to engage with, whether you‘re looking to ask questions, offer your development skills, report bugs, or suggest new features. Trending repos often have extensive documentation and active discussions that can accelerate your own learning.

4. Gain inspiration for your own projects. Exploring trending GitHub repos exposes you to creative new development concepts and implementations which can spark ideas for your own work. They showcase what‘s possible and provide concrete examples of how to architect different features and functionalities. Browsing quality code bases is one of the best ways to grow as a developer.

In short, tracking GitHub trends is a low-effort, high-impact habit that can help you sharpen your skills, expand your knowledge, and engage with new programming domains. Now let‘s look at the different ways you can identify trending repositories.

The GitHub Trending Page

The best place to start is GitHub‘s official trending page (https://github.com/trending). This page ranks repositories based on the number of new stars they have acquired over a given time period – either today, this week, or this month. Stars are how GitHub users can bookmark repositories of interest.

Some key features of the trending page include:

• Separate tabs for "Repositories" and "Developers", so you can see both trending projects and the GitHub users creating popular content
• Filters for narrowing the trending list by programming language (e.g. JavaScript, Python, Java)
• Spoken language filter for finding popular repos in your native tongue
• Links to browse historical GitHub trends from past days, weeks, or months
• Short repo descriptions and metadata like the primary language, total star count, and star velocity (e.g. "1,015 stars today")

While the trending page provides a quick and convenient pulse of the most starred projects on GitHub, it does have some limitations. The page only displays a maxiumum of 25 trending repositories per time period and language filter. It doesn‘t offer any options for receiving push notifications about new trends, nor does it personalize recommendations based on your GitHub profile and activity.

To address these shortcomings, let‘s examine some alternative methods for tracking GitHub trends, starting with official resources from GitHub itself.

Method 1: GitHub ‘Explore‘ Newsletters

In addition to the trending page, GitHub offers a set of newsletter digests that deliver trending repositories and personalized recommendations straight to your inbox. You can subscribe to these "Explore" newsletters from your GitHub settings (https://github.com/explore).

There are three different email frequencies to choose from:

• Daily: Receive trending repos and relevant updates every day
• Weekly: Get a weekly roundup of trends and suggestions (sent every Friday)
• Monthly: Receive a monthly digest of top projects and news (on the first Friday of the month)

The Explore emails typically include:

• The top 5 trending repositories across all programming languages (or that match languages you‘ve selected in your email preferences)
• Personalized repo/user recommendations based on your GitHub activity and the people you follow
• Links to new GitHub product announcements, community posts, and development guides

The advantages of the Explore emails are that they come straight from GitHub, offer some personalization, and allow you to choose your desired frequency for receiving trend updates. They are also the only way to get trending repo alerts delivered to your standard email inbox.

The downsides are that the Explore emails only contain "top 5" trend lists as opposed to the 25 you see on the actual trending page. While you can configure your email language preferences, there‘s no way to subscribe only to trends for a specific programming language (e.g. just JavaScript trends). The recommendations tend to favor the most popular, mainstream repositories.

Method 2: GitHub Trending Repo Bot

For a more granular way to get notified about GitHub trends, there‘s a creative solution in the form of a dedicated "GitHub Trending" repository (https://github.com/vitalets/github-trending-repos). This special repo uses GitHub‘s notification system to alert you to new trending projects for specific programming languages that you "watch".

Here‘s how it works:

• The repo contains a set of "issues", one for each major programming language
• Every day, an automated script generates a comment for each language‘s issue with a list of the top 10 trending repos for that language
• If you "watch" the issues for the languages you care about, you‘ll receive notifications every time the bot posts a new batch of trending repos
• You can choose to get these notifications via email and/or web notifications in GitHub

This approach solves two key limitations of the Explore newsletters – the ability to get updates about language-specific trends and the option to receive those updates as web notifications that you can check in GitHub itself. It also doubles the number of trending repos you can discover (10 per language per day).

The main downside is that it hijacks your GitHub notification stream, which you may prefer to keep focused only on your own project and collaboration updates. It‘s also more work to configure the language subscriptions you want. And currently, the trending repo bot only supports 10 languages compared to the 50+ covered on the actual trending page.

Method 3: Trending GitHub Twitter Bot

If you‘re an avid Twitter user, you can get a steady stream of GitHub trends delivered right to your Twitter feed. The @TrendingGithub (https://twitter.com/TrendingGithub) Twitter bot tweets out a new trending GitHub repository or developer every 30 minutes.

The benefits of the Twitter bot approach are:

• Easily discover new GitHub trends on a platform you likely already check frequently
• See trending projects and developers across all languages
• Retweet and share interesting repos with your network in one click
• Save tweets to bookmark repos for later

However, the Twitter bot doesn‘t allow you to filter trending repos by language. The frequent pace of tweets could get distracting or annoying. And since it‘s a third-party bot not affiliated with GitHub, there‘s a question of how long it will remain active and how it determines which repos to feature.

Method 4: Changelog Nightly Newsletter

Another great third-party resource for tracking GitHub trends is the Changelog Nightly newsletter (https://changelog.com/nightly). Changelog is a popular developer news site and podcast network. Their Nightly newsletter is a curated roundup of interesting and trending open-source projects on GitHub.

Each nightly email contains three sections:

1. New Releases – featuring open-source projects that have published a new version in the past 24 hours
2. Trending Projects – highlighting repos that are rapidly gaining new stars, separated into three categories:
   • first-timers – newly trending repos that have never appeared in the newsletter before
   • trending – the top repos trending over the past day
   • most-stars – well-established, popular repos with an exceptionally high number of total stars
3. New & Noteworthy – showcasing brand new repos created in the past day that are already gaining traction

What‘s neat about Changelog Nightly is the additional context it provides beyond just a list of popular repos. It pulls in metadata from the GitHub API to enhance the trend recommendations with information like:

• Repo descriptions for at-a-glance info about each project
• Primary programming language labels
• Links to release notes for repos that have published a new version
• "Added by" attribution linking to the GitHub user who created new noteworthy repos
• "Most starred" designation for the top 3 most popular projects

The smart categorization and curation makes it easier to quickly identify newly trending projects vs established popular ones. And because Changelog Nightly gets data from the GitHub Archive (a public dataset of all GitHub activities), it can surface a wider breadth of trends than the official GitHub trending page.

The main drawbacks are that it‘s email-only and the emails come every single night, with no option for a weekly rollup. Like the other methods, you can‘t filter the trends by language. And some of the "new & noteworthy" repos it features end up being short-lived trends.

Method 5: Browse Daily Snapshots of GitHub Trends

Finally, if you prefer a more low-key, on-demand approach to tracking GitHub trends, you can browse the "github-trending" repository (https://github.com/josephyzhou/github-trending). This repo contains a historical archive of the top 20-25 trending repositories for a handful of popular programming languages, captured and committed once per day.

Essentially, it‘s a self-contained version of the GitHub trending page you can clone or download to review past trends at your leisure. For each language, the top trending repos are listed in a markdown table with the following information:

• Repo name and owner
• Primary programming language
• Total star count
• Description
• Trending rank for the day

This approach is good for casual perusal of GitHub trends without any of the noise or urgency of push notifications and emails. It‘s handy for doing research into which repos were generating buzz on a particular day in the past. And it‘s an interesting data set for analysis of historical patterns in open-source popularity.

On the downside, these trend archives only go back to late 2016 and cover just 7 languages compared to the live trending page. The once-daily snapshots also lack the granularity and velocity info of live data. It takes more work on your part to regularly check the repo and diff changes over time.

Conclusion

So which GitHub trend tracking method should you use? Ultimately, it depends on your preferences and goals. Here are a few recommendations:

• If you like to keep on top of the latest and greatest open-source projects, the official GitHub trending page and newsletters are your best bet. They provide the most timely, comprehensive view directly from the source.
• If you‘re mainly interested in tracking a specific programming language or two, the GitHub trending repo bot and Changelog Nightly provide more granular options to filter your trend alerts.
• If you live in Twitter and prefer seeing trends in your main social feed, the @TrendingGithub Twitter bot is worth a follow. It‘s also useful for easily sharing interesting repos you discover.
• If you enjoy going down rabbit holes of popular repos from the past and don‘t want any extra notifications, periodically browsing the "github-trending" repo snapshots could be sufficient.
• Consider picking 2 or more of these methods that complement each other. For example, you could skim the trending page regularly while also subscribing to the Changelog Nightly email to get a curated take.

Whichever method(s) you choose, the real key is to make checking GitHub trends a regular habit – daily, weekly, or at whatever interval makes sense for your development workflow. Challenge yourself to discover and try out a certain number of new trending repos or technologies each month. Remember to star interesting projects to bookmark them for later and boost their visibility. And look for opportunities to learn from and contribute to promising new projects.

Tracking GitHub trends is one of the easiest and most effective ways to stay plugged into where software development is heading. It exposes you to innovative ideas and connects you to communities of like-minded developers around the world. By adopting one or more of the trend tracking methods outlined here, you‘ll position yourself to continuously sharpen your skills, expand your horizons, and stay ahead of the curve. Happy trend spotting!