What is GitHub Star Tracker?
GitHub Star Tracker is a powerful GitHub Action that automatically monitors star counts across all your repositories on a schedule. It generates comprehensive visual reports with charts and badges, tracks historical trends, and sends notifications when changes are detected. Every time the action runs, it commits artifacts to a dedicated data branch, giving you a complete history of your repository’s growth and engagement.Key Features
Animated SVG Charts
Star history, per-repo trends, top repository comparisons, and growth forecasts with automatic dark/light mode support
Historical Tracking
Configurable retention (default 52 snapshots) with JSON persistence to track your growth over time
Smart Filtering
Filter by visibility, ownership, minimum stars, regex patterns, archived status, and forks
Stargazer Tracking
See who starred your repos with avatars and timestamps to understand your community
Email Notifications
Built-in SMTP support with fixed or adaptive thresholds to stay informed of changes
Multiple Export Formats
Generate Markdown, HTML, CSV, and JSON reports for any use case
What You Get
Every run, Star Tracker commits these artifacts to your data branch:Visual Assets
Animated SVG Charts that automatically adapt to dark/light mode:- Star history across all repositories
- Per-repository trend lines
- Top repositories comparison
- Growth forecasts based on historical data
Reports and Data
Markdown & HTML Reports featuring:- Summary tables with delta indicators
- New and removed repository tracking
- Stargazer details (when enabled)
- Forecast tables showing projected growth
- CSV format for spreadsheets and data analysis
- JSON format for dashboards and downstream pipelines
All generated charts use the
prefers-color-scheme CSS media query to automatically match the viewer’s theme preference. No configuration required!How It Works
The action follows a straightforward execution pipeline:Configuration & Fetching
Parses your configuration and queries the GitHub REST API to fetch all repositories matching your filters
Data Branch Initialization
Creates or accesses an orphan branch (default:
star-tracker-data) to store historical dataComparison & Analysis
Deserializes the previous snapshot, computes delta metrics, and optionally fetches individual stargazers
Action Outputs
The action provides rich outputs that can be used in downstream workflow steps:| Output | Description |
|---|---|
total-stars | Total star count across all tracked repositories |
stars-changed | Whether any star counts changed (true/false) |
new-stars | Number of stars gained since last run |
lost-stars | Number of stars lost since last run |
should-notify | Whether notification threshold was reached |
new-stargazers | Number of new stargazers detected |
report | Full Markdown report |
report-html | HTML report (ideal for email) |
report-csv | CSV report for data pipelines |
You can chain these outputs to other actions in your workflow. For example, use
total-stars to update a README badge, or report to post to Slack.Use Cases
- Portfolio Tracking: Monitor star growth across all your open source projects
- Team Analytics: Generate weekly reports for your organization’s repositories
- Community Engagement: Track who’s starring your repos and when
- Growth Metrics: Use CSV exports in data dashboards and BI tools
- Automated Notifications: Get alerts when star counts change significantly
- Historical Analysis: Understand trends and forecast future growth
System Requirements
- GitHub Actions workflow with
contents: writepermission - Personal Access Token (PAT) with
repoorpublic_reposcope - Node.js 24+ runtime (automatically provided by GitHub Actions)
Next Steps
Quickstart
Get up and running in under 5 minutes
Installation Guide
Detailed setup instructions with PAT creation
Configuration
Explore all configuration options
Examples
Real-world workflow configurations