Update: new API endpoint available for privacy-safe star history data

[moraesc]

We just released a new endpoint that restores access to stargazer data for the projects and tools that depend on it. This is a direct response to feedback from this community after our earlier changes to the watchers/stargazers endpoints caused real disruption. Thank you for being patient, and more importantly, for sharing your feedback.

What happened

Earlier this year, we restricted access to the stargazer and watcher endpoints to address abuse we were seeing at scale. It was the right call for platform integrity, but we know it wasn't a clean one, as it broke workflows for maintainers and tools that relied on this data. We heard from those users directly and have since worked with them to shape what we're shipping this week.

What's changing

We're introducing a new GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/stargazers/history endpoint focused on the thing most of you actually need: counts and trends over time, not raw identity data. In practice, that means:

• Weekly star counts going back through your repository's history
• Daily breakdowns within each week, so you can see patterns in how stars accumulate
• No exposure of individual stargazer identities

The endpoint returns data organized by week with the total stars added and a day-by-day breakdown, giving star-history tools and dashboards exactly the granularity they need while keeping the abuse-prevention protections we put in place. We're not just flipping the old switch back on; we're building something better suited to what the community is actually trying to do.

What we need from you

• Try it out and tell us if it covers your star-history and analytics needs.
• If you maintain a tool that broke because of the earlier change, let us know if this gets you unblocked.
• If there's a gap, leave a comment below. This thread is the place to keep the conversation going.
  Learn more in the GitHub REST API documentation.
   
  Thank you for continuing to share your feedback. Please keep it coming!

[martin-mfg]

Thank you for addressing the need for star history data.

Could you please also support decreasing star counts? When requesting recent star counts for e.g. anuraghazra/github-readme-stats via the new API endpoint, all returned counts are >= 0. But according to the data from https://afterglow.watch/, the star count of anuraghazra/github-readme-stats actually decreased on some of these days.

The new endpoint's documentation hints at the current behaviour by saying "The days array contains the number of stars created". But I think data which also respects decreases would be more helpful. Maybe support for decreasing counts could at least be enabled via a new parameter?

[mfridman]

Thank you for putting effort into this. I used to maintain a somewhat popular website that tracked Go repositories with >=50 stars (inspired by bestofjs), but had to shut it down because the data was no longer available. It was tracking ~32K repositories with a total of ~23M stars.

https://bestofgo.dev/

I aimed for 1-hour granularity, and it was using a fairly clever way to reduce the number of API calls (leverging both /v3 and /v4 APIs), especially for repositories with a large star count.

Hoping to give this new API a try and report back.

Quick question: if a user un-stars a repository, will the history reflect that? I.e., will the number decrement immediately? Yep, and looks like it's ~almost immediate