GitHub Star Search

A GitHub Pages app and Windows-friendly TypeScript CLI for searching starred repositories without cloning thousands of repos.

What it does

• Runs as a static github.io search app from the docs/ folder.
• Fetches starred repositories directly from GitHub in the browser.
• Searches star metadata locally after loading: name, owner, description, language, topics, dates, and URL.
• Calculates StarRank, an age-adjusted repository momentum rating based on stars/year, forks/year, fork surprise, raw popularity, topics, description, and license metadata.
• Supports IndexedDB browser cache, JSON export, and JSON import.
• Keeps large star lists responsive with debounced search, precomputed search fields, batched rendering, spreadsheet-style column filters, and on-demand correlation analysis.
• Syncs your starred repositories from GitHub into a local cache.
• Searches code remotely through GitHub's API, one starred repo at a time, so repositories do not need to be cloned.
• Saves machine-readable JSON results for later filtering or import into other tools.
• Prints StarRank beside CLI metadata search results when cached repository records include createdAt.

Why this exists

GitHub lets you view starred repositories, but it does not provide a focused public search app for quickly filtering all of a user's stars by repository metadata. Cloning thousands of starred repositories is slow, wasteful, and hard to maintain. This project uses GitHub's API first, then searches locally in the browser or CLI.

GitHub Pages app

The static app lives in docs/:

docs/index.html
docs/styles.css
docs/app.js

To publish it on GitHub Pages:

1. Open the repository settings on GitHub.
2. Go to Pages.
3. Set Source to Deploy from a branch.
4. Set Branch to main and folder to /docs.
5. Save. GitHub will publish the app at the repository's Pages URL.

Browser privacy model

• Star metadata is fetched from https://api.github.com.
• Search runs locally in the browser after loading stars.
• Star metadata is cached in browser IndexedDB so repeat visits do not need to refetch thousands of repositories.
• The optional token is used only for GitHub API requests in the current page and is intended for higher API limits.
• Fully private-star access needs a future OAuth/device-flow implementation.
• A small cache summary is stored in browser localStorage.
• Tokens are not written to the repository, exported JSON, or local cache.

Correlations

The Correlations panel is computed only when requested. It looks for patterns in your starred repositories and suggests useful searches:

• similar repositories based on shared topics, language, and owner
• topic pairs that often appear together
• language/topic clusters
• owner/topic concentrations
• popular topic searches

Correlation suggestions stay local in the browser and their Search buttons load the matching query or topic filter.

StarRank

StarRank is an age-adjusted repository momentum score. It favors repositories with current attention and developer reuse instead of only old accumulated star counts. The app shows the score in a sortable table column and supports column-level filters for name, stars, StarRank, language, updated date, and age, with a clear-table-filters control for resetting the grid.

The current GitHub starred-repository API response provides creation date, stars, forks, topics, description, and license metadata. README presence is not proven by that list response, so the README bonus is applied only when imported data explicitly includes hasReadme: true; optional README fetching is tracked as future work.

Older browser caches created before StarRank may not include createdAt. When that happens, the app refreshes GitHub-sourced caches from the starred repositories API so StarRank can be calculated instead of guessing repository age.

Requirements

• Windows 11 or any system with Node.js 20+
• pnpm
• A GitHub token in GH_TOKEN

The token should be kept in your local environment only. Do not commit it.

Quick start

pnpm install
copy .env.example .env
notepad .env
pnpm build
pnpm pages:check
pnpm stars:sync
pnpm stars:search "mcp"
pnpm stars:code "createServer" -- --limit-repos 25

Commands

Sync starred repositories

pnpm stars:sync

Writes:

data/starred-repos.json

Search cached metadata

pnpm stars:search "agent"
pnpm stars:search "typescript" -- --language TypeScript
pnpm stars:search "mcp" -- --topic mcp

Search code remotely

pnpm stars:code "createServer" -- --limit-repos 50
pnpm stars:code "GM_registerMenuCommand" -- --repo-filter userscript
pnpm stars:code "vector" -- --language TypeScript --limit-repos 100

Remote code search intentionally defaults to a limited number of repositories because GitHub search is rate-limited.

Output files

data/starred-repos.json
out/metadata-search-results.json
out/code-search-results.json

Safety rules

• No repository cloning.
• No token logging.
• No destructive GitHub writes.
• Local cache and output files are ignored by git.

Current status

Static GitHub Pages app plus starter CLI scaffold. The next useful features are OAuth/device-flow sign-in, SQLite indexing for the CLI, resumable code search, rate-limit-aware queueing, and optional README/file-content sampling through GitHub Contents API.