GitHubGitHub stars in the MacBook notch
Stars are GitHub's bookmark, and for an open-source project they are the closest thing to a public growth chart.
What a star actually counts
A star is one account marking the repository. It is not a download, not a fork and not a user. A project with ten thousand stars may have a hundred people running it, and a tool with four hundred stars may be in production at every one of those four hundred companies. Read it as attention, not adoption.
GitHub returns the current total on the repository object as
stargazers_count. There is no endpoint for the total on an arbitrary past
day: the starring events exist, but reconstructing a history means paging
through every one of them with a preview media type, which is why most star
history charts are built by a service that has been recording the number
daily since before you needed it.
Why the widget has no sparkline
Notch Metrics reports the count GitHub returns right now. Asking for a sparkline would mean paging the full stargazer history on every refresh, and the rate limit makes that a bad trade for a number that moves slowly.
The widget asks which repository to count, in owner/name form, because one
GitHub connection usually covers several. Add a second widget for a second
repository.
What GitHub stars means, exactly
Stargazers on the repository right now.
A whole number.
How the widget behaves
- Buckets
- hourly, daily, weekly and monthly
- Shape
- A figure, with no sparkline
- Against last period
- No
- Fetched from
- api.github.com
What the widget asks you for
- Repository
- Which repository this tile counts.
- owner/name
Questions
- How is GitHub stars calculated?
- Stargazers on the repository right now. Notch Metrics reports that number, unchanged, in the MacBook notch.
- Can I see GitHub stars over time?
- GitHub stars is a snapshot of right now, so the widget shows the figure without a sparkline. The windows it accepts are 24 hours, 7, 30 and 90 days, and 12 months.
- What unit is GitHub stars in?
- A whole number.
- What does it cost to put GitHub stars in the notch?
- $9 a month, or $49 a year, with every connector included and no per-integration charge. The seven-day trial needs no card, so you can see your own stars before deciding.