GitHub Released Aggregate Star History API

The new endpoint provides weekly stargazing trends while protecting user privacy by withholding individual identities.

Updated on Oct. 14, 2026 in Software

GitHub Released Aggregate Star History API

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On Sept. 4, 2026, GitHub announced a new API endpoint designed to provide repository star counts without exposing individual user identities. The tool delivers aggregate daily star counts grouped by calendar week, effectively anonymizing the historical popularity data of open-source projects.

Why it matters

This development balances the community's need for longitudinal project growth metrics with the imperative to prevent the exposure of individual user activity logs. It standardizes how developers track repository interest without requiring the processing of thousands of individual user records.

The new endpoint returns up to 30 weeks of history in a single request, significantly increasing efficiency compared to legacy methods. For a repository like react/react, which has 251,000 total stars, the new approach reduces the number of necessary API calls by over 99%.

The players

GitHub

A Microsoft-owned platform providing cloud-based version control and collaboration tools for developers.

The details

Developers access the aggregate data using the GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/stargazers/history endpoint. The API aggregates daily star counts by calendar week and allows developers to page backward through historical records to build long-term growth visualizations. Notably, the endpoint excludes stars that have been removed from repositories and does not guarantee that data boundaries will align with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

GitHub announced the star history API on Sept. 4, 2026.
GitHub published the design explanation for the API on Oct. 14, 2026.

The Tech Race

This release shifts the data-access paradigm away from the legacy GitHub stargazer API endpoints, which previously required thousands of individual record pulls to reconstruct historical trends. It aligns the platform with evolving privacy-preserving data standards in software analytics.

Developers and maintainers can now integrate star history trends into their dashboards using significantly fewer API calls. The new endpoint is available immediately for all public repositories, though users should account for non-UTC boundary shifts when graphing data.

The takeaway

The move to aggregate data confirms that GitHub is prioritizing efficient, privacy-conscious telemetry over raw, per-user data access for public metrics. Developers should verify their data processing pipelines to accommodate the weekly grouping provided by the new endpoint.