| name | github-stars |
| description | Show a GitHub repo's star growth as CLI charts — by day and by hour, in any timezone. Use when the user asks to "check GitHub stars", "stars by hour/day for <repo>", "star growth", "how many stars did <repo> get today", or shares a repo name and wants its starring activity over time. |
github-stars
Fetch a repo's per-star timestamps from the GitHub API and render two ASCII charts in the terminal: stars by day and stars by hour (for the most recent day(s)). Useful for tracking a launch, a Show HN / Product Hunt spike, or DevRel growth.
Requirements
- The
gh CLI installed and authenticated (gh auth status). Unauthenticated calls hit a low rate limit and large repos fail mid-pagination.
- Python 3.9+ (uses the stdlib
zoneinfo for correct DST handling).
How it works
The script calls gh api with the application/vnd.github.star+json Accept header, which adds a starred_at timestamp to each stargazer. It paginates through all stargazers, converts each timestamp to the target timezone, and buckets them by day and by hour.
Usage
The script lives next to this file. From the skill directory:
bash github-stars.sh <owner/repo | search-term> [--tz <IANA tz>] [--days N] [--hours-days N]
<owner/repo> — exact repo (e.g. facebook/react). Skips the search.<search-term> — a bare word (no /) is resolved to the top repo by stars.--tz — IANA timezone for all buckets. Default America/Los_Angeles. Use e.g. UTC, America/New_York, Asia/Shanghai, Europe/Berlin.--days N — how many recent days to show in the daily chart (default 14).--hours-days N — how many recent days to break out hourly (default 2).
Examples
bash github-stars.sh vercel/next.js
bash github-stars.sh next.js --tz UTC
bash github-stars.sh facebook/react --days 7 --hours-days 1
Sample output
owner/repo — 284 stars (with timestamps)
newest: 2026-06-15 02:03 PM PDT | now: 2026-06-15 02:11 PM PDT
STARS BY DAY (PDT)
2026-06-13 16 █████████
2026-06-14 69 ████████████████████████████████████████ ← peak
2026-06-15 22 █████████████
STARS BY HOUR — 2026-06-15 (PDT) total 22
06:00 5 ██████████████████████████████
07:00 2 ████████████
14:00 2 ████████████
Caveats — surface these to the user when relevant
- 40,000-star cap: GitHub only returns
starred_at for the first 40k stargazers. Past that, the hourly/daily breakdown is incomplete (the script warns). The plain total stays accurate.
- Net, not gross: the stargazer list reflects stars currently in place. Un-stars don't appear, so a flat total between two checks can hide +1/−1 churn. If the live
stargazers_count disagrees with the timestamp count, an un-star happened.
- DST is handled automatically via
zoneinfo — don't hardcode UTC offsets.
Re-checking / live polling
Just run the script again — it re-fetches live each time. To watch a launch, re-run on an interval and report the delta; don't poll faster than every ~15 minutes (rate limits + politeness).
