Fetching Stargazers - by Patrick DeVivo - AskGit Newsletter
A user reached out asking if AskGit could export the GitHub profiles of everyone who starred their repository. Absolutely it can! 🎉
And that’s it! You may want to add a --format csv or --format json to get your stargazers in a more usable output format (and pipe the results to a file).1
The folks over at Supabase maintain repository.surf, which lets you visualize stargazers over time for public repos - very cool.
Adding a filter (WHERE) and an aggregation (COUNT) to the above lets you find how many people starred a repo over a particular time period. For instance2:
Will calculate how many people starred your repo in the past 10 days. Check out the available date and time functions to try other ranges.
An additional “metric” that could be interesting to see is “star throughput” over time - something like stars per day (the “velocity” of stargazer growth vs the total count), which may be a better indicator for project “popularity” at a moment in time.
The ORDER BY should prevent a “full table scan” of the stargazers of a repository, relying on the GitHub API to return results sorted by starred_at. See here for more context.
