I remember that GitHub used to have a dedicated section where you could browse through the most starred and most forked repositories. This feature was really helpful for discovering popular open source projects and seeing what the community was working on.
However, it seems like GitHub has removed this functionality and now only shows trending repositories for the current day, week, or month. The trending page is useful but it only displays recent activity rather than overall popularity metrics.
I’m looking for a way to find repositories that have the highest number of stars or forks of all time. Does anyone know if there’s still a way to access this information on GitHub directly, or do I need to use external tools or search methods to find the most popular repositories? Any suggestions would be appreciated.
The feature’s still there, just buried. Use GitHub’s advanced search with operators like stars:>=100000 or forks:>=10000 to find the most popular repos ever. Combine them with language filters - language:Python stars:>=50000 works great for targeted searches. Most people don’t realize you can get historical data through the API. I’ve scraped this stuff for years - GitHub keeps complete stats from when they started tracking stars. The web interface caps results, but the API lets you sort by total stars instead of just recent activity. For regular browsing, bookmark searches with different star ranges. I use stars:10000..50000 to hit that sweet spot between popular and manageable project sizes. Way better than trending pages that change every day.
GitHub’s search works great for this. Just add sort:stars to your search. Try stars:>10000 sort:stars to see repos with 10k+ stars ranked by popularity.
You can filter by language too: language:javascript sort:stars or search by topic.
Manual searching gets old fast though, especially if you want regular tracking or custom lists. I built automated workflows that hit GitHub’s API and pull the most starred repos based on whatever criteria I need.
Latenode makes this dead simple. Set up a workflow that grabs repo data from GitHub’s API and sends you weekly reports or updates a spreadsheet automatically. Zero coding needed.
I track trending repos in specific tech stacks and get alerts when something cool shows up. Way better than GitHub’s basic search.
GitHub’s search still works great for finding popular repos - just use the right parameters. Try stars:>50000 to find repos with 50k+ stars, then add filters for language or date ranges. For better discovery, check out third-party sites like GitHub Archive or repository ranking sites. They’ve got databases of popular projects sorted by different metrics, plus better filtering and historical data that GitHub doesn’t offer. If you’re comfortable with scripting, hit GitHub’s REST API directly. You can query repos by stars and use custom filters that aren’t available on the web interface. This gives you more control and lets you track popularity changes over time.