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GitHub

Updated

GitHub, like Bluesky, is one of the friendly ones: its REST API is public, well documented, and happy to answer profile lookups without any authentication at all. If GitHub is the only platform you care about, the official API is a fine choice, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

What the official API asks of you

Not much, until it does. Unauthenticated requests are capped at 60 per hour per IP address, which a dashboard or a nightly job over a list of accounts can burn through surprisingly fast. Past that you are into personal access tokens, token storage, and reading rate-limit headers. The data itself is clean JSON, with follower and following counts and a public repository count right on the user object.

What Metrika gives you for GitHub

Send a username or an organization name and get back the datapoints we hold for it: follower count, following count, and the number of public repositories on the account, returned as posts. Users and organizations live at the same kind of address, so both use the account type: torvalds and rails are equally valid identifiers.

bash 
$ curl -X POST https://metrika.run/api/v1/resources/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"resources": [{"platform": "github", "type": "account", "identifier": "rails"}]}'

Follower, following, and repository counts come back under metrics as followers, following, and posts, each with a value, a status, a collected_at timestamp so you know how fresh the number is, and a semantic field carrying GitHub's own term, repositories for the repository count.

Repositories too

Individual repositories are tracked as posts. Send the owner and the repository name joined by a colon, so github.com/rails/rails is rails:rails, and get back its star and fork counts.

bash 
$ curl -X POST https://metrika.run/api/v1/resources/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"resources": [{"platform": "github", "type": "post", "identifier": "rails:rails"}]}'

Stars come back under metrics as likes and forks as reposts, the common names every platform's posts use, each with a semantic field of stars or forks so your interface can use GitHub's own words.

The same request shape everywhere

GitHub is one of many platforms Metrika supports, alongside Instagram, X, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, Twitch, Kick, Telegram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Discord, Reddit, Spotify, and SoundCloud. The request you write here is the request you write for all of them, and that is the actual argument. A developer tool's audience rarely lives on one network, and a GitHub follower count is usually one row in a wider picture, next to the same name on X or Bluesky. One token, one response shape, up to ten accounts in a single call, mixing platforms freely.

What Metrika is not

Metrika is read-only and public-only. It will not read issues, pull requests, commits, releases, or traffic, and it will not list who starred or forked a repository. If you need that richer surface, the official API is the right tool for the job.

Getting started

Create an account, generate an API key from your dashboard, and you get up to 500 requests per month at no cost, no credit card required. The docs cover authentication and response formats.

Get started with Metrika

Create a free account and start pulling social media datapoints in minutes. The free tier includes 500 requests per month, no credit card required.

Create a free account Read the docs See pricing