A real-time radar of the GitHub repositories that are taking off.
Live star counts every minute · momentum scores · trend radar · buzz from YouTube and Hacker News
You hear about a project in a video or a post. Paste the link and TrendTracker shows where it comes from, how fast it is climbing right now, and who is talking about it. Or open the radar and see what the whole of GitHub is getting excited about, as it happens.
GitHub Trending gives you a list, refreshed a few times a day, with no history and no context. TrendTracker watches those repositories (and the new ones the list misses) minute by minute, keeps its own history, and tells you which projects are genuinely accelerating, not just big.
- Live. With a GitHub token, the star count of every repository on screen is re-read every minute and pushed to the page over Server-Sent Events. Counters tick up, the radar ripples when a project gets new stars.
- Honest numbers. Gains over 24 h, 7 days and 30 days come from our own snapshots, read between the two snapshots around the start of each window. They always add up (24 h ≤ 7 d ≤ 30 d ≤ total), and when we have not watched long enough the app says so instead of guessing.
- Context. Every repository links back to the YouTube videos, Hacker News stories, Lobsters, Mastodon and Bluesky posts that mention it.
- No fake data. Only public, anonymous sources. Platforms without usable public access (X, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit) are not simulated.
| Radar | One spoke per repository, sectors by domain (AI, web, tools, infra…), strongest in the centre. Rank by momentum, stars in 24 h or acceleration. Green and red ticks show who speeds up or slows down. |
| Pulse | The day at a glance: stars gained, newcomers, what moves in the last 30 minutes, a three-line brief, today's Trending. |
| Trending archive | GitHub Trending (day, week, month, by language), archived every day, sortable by GitHub rank or by stars gained. |
| Repository page | Live stars, gains, momentum, dated badges (#1 on Trending, days in a row…), stars / forks / merged PRs per day, star history, commits, languages, releases, mentions, similar projects. |
| Explorer | Search by name or topic, or paste any GitHub link. Filters by domain and language. |
| Topics & developers | Topics and accounts ranked by the stars their repositories gain today. |
| Compare | Up to four repositories side by side, star curves by date or since creation. |
| Buzz | YouTube videos (20 developer channels), Hacker News, Lobsters, Mastodon and Bluesky posts that link to a repository. |
| Boards & alerts | Follow repositories in boards, add notes, share a board publicly, get e-mail alerts when one enters Trending or spikes. |
| README badge | A live badge (#1 on Trending, +2.1k ★ this week) maintainers can paste into their README. |
| AI analyst | Optional: what the project is, why it is rising, who it is for (Claude, with ANTHROPIC_API_KEY). |
The interface is in French for now. An English version is the first item on the roadmap.
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Requirements: Node.js 20.9 or later. No database to install: without DATABASE_URL, an embedded Postgres (PGlite) is
created in .data/pglite.
git clone https://github.com/jaggerTheStone/TrendTracker.git
cd TrendTracker
npm install
cp .env.example .env.local # optional, see below
npm run devOpen http://localhost:3000. The first collection starts two seconds after launch, then runs every 5 minutes.
Strongly recommended: add a GITHUB_TOKEN to .env.local. A
classic token with no scope ticked is enough. It raises the GitHub quota from
60 to 5,000 calls an hour and turns on the one-minute live refresh (a few GraphQL points per minute).
Everything is optional for local use. See .env.example for details.
| Variable | What it does |
|---|---|
GITHUB_TOKEN |
5,000 calls/hour and live star counts every minute |
DATABASE_URL |
Any Postgres (Neon, Supabase…). Empty: embedded PGlite |
INGEST_INTERVAL_MINUTES / LIVE_INTERVAL_SECONDS |
Full collection (default 5 min) and live refresh (default 60 s). 0 disables |
SMTP_HOST, SMTP_PORT, SMTP_USER, SMTP_PASSWORD or RESEND_API_KEY |
Sign-in codes and alerts by e-mail. Without them, codes are printed in the console (dev only) |
GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID, GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET |
Google sign-in in a pop-up (redirect URI /api/auth/callback/google) |
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY |
Enables the AI analyst on repository pages |
BETTER_AUTH_SECRET, BETTER_AUTH_URL, CRON_SECRET |
Required in production |
- Gain (24 h, 7 d, 30 d): current count minus the count at the start of the window, read between the two snapshots around it. A repository created inside the window gained all its stars in it. Otherwise GitHub Trending's own figure, then an extrapolation if we watched at least half of the window; otherwise "—".
- Acceleration: stars in the last 24 h divided by the average of the previous days (or the previous 24 h).
- Momentum (0–100): speed (60 %, percentile among all active repositories), relative growth (15 %), acceleration (10 %) and buzz weighted by source (15 %). Bluesky buzz counts likes and reposts. A repository outside the ranking is scored against the same pool, so a score means the same thing everywhere.
- Status: on fire (top 5 % by speed, ≥ 100 ★/day), accelerating (≥ ×1.4 and ≥ 20 ★/day), slowing down (≤ ×0.6), new (created less than 7 days ago), otherwise steady.
- Snapshots: at most one every 4 minutes per repository; after 6 hours, one per half hour, then one every 4 hours after 3 days and one a day after a month, kept for 400 days.
GitHub no longer publishes stargazer lists, so star history starts the day TrendTracker first sees a repository.
| Source | What we take from it |
|---|---|
| GitHub Trending | Stars gained today, this week, this month (all languages + 7 languages) |
| GitHub API | New repositories taking off, metadata, live star counts (GraphQL) |
| YouTube | Repositories linked in the descriptions of 20 developer channels (RSS) |
| Hacker News | Stories of the week pointing to a repository |
| Lobsters, Mastodon | GitHub links being shared |
| Bluesky | Public posts linking to GitHub repositories (no account required) |
src/
app/ pages and API routes (App Router)
api/stream Server-Sent Events: a fresh overview after every refresh
api/overview ranked repositories, mentions, source status
api/ingest collection endpoint for external schedulers (?live for counts only)
components/ views, charts, radar
server/
sources/ one collector per source
github/api.ts GitHub REST + GraphQL client with per-token quotas
ingest.ts full collection, enrichment, snapshot compaction
live.ts star counts of everything on screen, every minute
overview.ts gains, acceleration, momentum, status
repo-detail.ts repository page (cached 6 h)
db/ Drizzle schema, PGlite or Postgres
drizzle/ SQL migrations
Built with Next.js 16 (App Router, Cache Components), React 19, Tailwind CSS 4, Motion, Drizzle ORM, PGlite / Postgres and Better Auth.
- A Postgres database (Neon, Supabase…) in
DATABASE_URL, thennpm run db:migrate. - Set
BETTER_AUTH_SECRET,BETTER_AUTH_URL,CRON_SECRET,GITHUB_TOKEN, plus Google, SMTP/Resend or Anthropic keys as needed. - Scheduling: on a long-running server (
npm run build && npm start), the built-in scheduler collects every 5 minutes and refreshes counts every minute. On serverless,.github/workflows/ingest.ymlcalls/api/ingestevery 5 minutes (repository variableAPP_URL, secretCRON_SECRET), and any one-minute cron can call/api/ingest?live.
| Command | Purpose |
|---|---|
npm run dev |
dev server + automatic collection |
npm run build / npm start |
production build and server |
npm run db:generate |
new migration after a schema change |
npm run db:migrate |
apply migrations to DATABASE_URL |
npm run ingest |
one-off collection (Postgres) |
npm run lint / typecheck / format |
quality checks |
- English interface (i18n), then other languages
- One-click deploy and a public demo
- Bluesky as a buzz source (#11)
- More sources: Product Hunt, dev.to
- Topic and language radars, weekly digest page
- Docker image
Ideas and votes are welcome in issues.
Contributions are welcome: read CONTRIBUTING.md to get started, and please follow the code of conduct. To report a vulnerability, see SECURITY.md.
If TrendTracker is useful to you, a ⭐ helps other people find it.
MIT © jaggerTheStone
The logo is derived from the "github-alt" icon of Font Awesome Free (CC BY 4.0), redrawn in relief with gradients.