🐙 GitHub Repo Intelligence: Stars, README & Release Data

Overview

GitHub Repo Intelligence returns deep, structured metadata for any public GitHub repository: stars, forks, open issues, full language breakdown, topics, license, README text, contributor count, latest release, and commit recency. No GitHub token required for small batches, and optional token support for larger ones. Give it a list of owner/repo names or GitHub URLs and get back one clean JSON record per repo.

Built lean and HTTP-only against GitHub's own public REST API (no browser, no proxy needed). Ideal for OSS due diligence, dependency review, competitive scans, and AI agents that need live repo data.

Reliability posture: blocked, empty, or failed runs are never charged. You only pay for a repo record that was actually analyzed and delivered.

✅ No token needed for small batches | ✅ Full README included | ✅ Contributor count solved | ✅ MCP-ready for AI agents

Features

Batch multiple repos in one run with automatic pagination and rate-limit handling. Optional githubToken to raise the rate limit from 60 to 5000 requests per hour. Full README text fetched and decoded for every repo when includeReadme is on. Real contributor count computed via the Link-header pagination trick. Same output whether you consume it via CSV, JSON, Excel, API, or MCP tool call.

How it works

GitHub's REST API is open and generous, but three things make it painful in practice: rate limits require token juggling, the contributor count is not returned as a plain number (you have to walk the Link header of the contributors endpoint), and the README endpoint returns base64 that needs decoding. This actor wraps all of that. You give it a list of repos, it returns flat structured records.

Every field lives at the top level. Stars, forks, license, topics, contributor count, latest release tag and date, plus a fully decoded README string. No nested JSON blobs, no per-request boilerplate on your side.

🧾 Input configuration

{
  "repos": [
    "anthropics/claude-code",
    "https://github.com/vercel/next.js"
  ],
  "includeReadme": true,
  "githubToken": null
}

📤 Output format

This record was captured live against the real GitHub org for React. Note that GitHub itself now redirects the historical facebook/react path to the react/react org, and the actor's output reflects GitHub's own current canonical values:

{
  "owner": "react",
  "repo": "react",
  "fullName": "react/react",
  "url": "https://github.com/react/react",
  "description": "The library for web and native user interfaces.",
  "stars": 246497,
  "forks": 51229,
  "openIssues": 1201,
  "primaryLanguage": "JavaScript",
  "languages": {
    "JavaScript": 5644629,
    "Rust": 2965252,
    "TypeScript": 2567778,
    "HTML": 116938,
    "CSS": 96296,
    "CoffeeScript": 18691,
    "Shell": 12488
  },
  "topics": ["declarative", "frontend", "javascript", "library", "react", "ui"],
  "license": "MIT",
  "defaultBranch": "main",
  "createdAt": "2013-05-24T16:15:54Z",
  "updatedAt": "2026-07-15T03:47:56Z",
  "lastCommitAt": "2026-07-14T13:11:05Z",
  "homepage": "https://react.dev",
  "isArchived": false,
  "isFork": false,
  "contributorsCount": 1997,
  "latestReleaseTag": "v19.2.7",
  "latestReleaseAt": "2026-06-01T18:04:24Z",
  "readme": "# [React](https://react.dev/) ...\n\nReact is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces.\n\n* **Declarative:** React makes it painless to create interactive UIs...",
  "charged": false,
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-15T04:15:08.359Z"
}

Every repo record contains these fields:

Field	Description
👤 owner	Repo owner (user or org)
📦 repo	Repo name
🏷️ fullName	owner/repo
🔗 url	Canonical GitHub URL
📝 description	Repo description
⭐ stars	Star count
🍴 forks	Fork count
🐛 openIssues	Open issue count
🗣️ primaryLanguage	Primary language
📊 languages	Bytes of code per language, straight from GitHub's languages endpoint
🏷️ topics	Array of GitHub topics
📜 license	License identifier
🌿 defaultBranch	Default branch name
📅 createdAt	Repo creation datetime
🔄 updatedAt	Last update datetime
⏰ lastCommitAt	Last commit datetime on default branch
🏠 homepage	Homepage URL
🗄️ isArchived	True if archived
🔁 isFork	True if this repo is a fork
👥 contributorsCount	Real contributor count
🚀 latestReleaseTag	Latest release tag
📅 latestReleaseAt	Latest release datetime
📖 readme	Full decoded README text
💳 charged	True if the pay-per-event charge for this record went through
🕒 scraped_at	ISO timestamp of capture

💼 Common use cases

OSS due diligence and adoption Evaluate a dependency's health before adopting it: contributor count, commit recency, release cadence, license. Compare candidate libraries in a category on stars, contributors, and recent activity in one dataset.

Competitive and market intelligence Track competitor OSS projects on stars, contributors, and release velocity over time. Map an entire OSS landscape (e.g. every LLM agent framework) into one structured table.

Developer relations and community Build weekly reports on your OSS project's growth versus peers. Surface trending repos to feature in a newsletter or dashboard.

AI research and coding agents Give an agent live repo data so it can answer "is this library maintained?" Feed READMEs into a RAG index so an agent can reason over a set of projects.

🚀 Getting started

1. Open the actor and paste a list of repos into repos (any mix of owner/repo or GitHub URLs).
2. Leave includeReadme on to pull the full README, off for smaller records.
3. Optionally paste a githubToken for large batches (60/hr becomes 5000/hr).
4. Click Start, then download the dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel, or pull it via API or MCP.

FAQ

Do I need a GitHub token? Not for small batches (up to a few dozen repos per hour). For larger runs, drop in a personal access token to unlock the 5000/hr limit.

Why include the README? Most integrations skip it because it needs base64 decoding. This actor decodes it for you, which is essential for AI agents doing repo triage.

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 repos delivered. You pay only for repos actually analyzed and returned. Not found or private repos are never charged. There is no free tier.

Use in Claude, ChatGPT & any MCP agent

https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=themineworks/github-repo-intelligence

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-repo-intelligence').call({
  repos: ['anthropics/claude-code', 'vercel/next.js'],
  includeReadme: true,
});

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 Trending Scraper: pull the daily, weekly, and monthly trending repos by language.
• 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 rising projects, github-repo-intelligence pulls their deep metadata, rag-crawler indexes their docs for an AI copilot.

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