Generate visualizations of GitHub user and repository statistics with GitHub Actions. Visualizations can include data for both private repositories, and for repositories you have contributed to, but do not own.
Generated images automatically switch between GitHub light theme and GitHub dark theme.
When someone views a profile on GitHub, it is often because they are curious about a user's open source projects and contributions. Unfortunately, that user's stars, forks, and pinned repositories do not necessarily reflect the contributions they make to private repositories. The data likewise does not present a complete picture of the user's total contributions beyond the current year.
This project aims to collect a variety of profile and repository statistics using the GitHub API. It then generates images that can be displayed in repository READMEs, or in a user's Profile README.
Since the project runs on GitHub Actions, no server is required to regularly regenerate the images with updated statistics. Likewise, since the user runs the analysis code themselves via GitHub Actions, they can use their GitHub access token to collect statistics on private repositories that an external service would be unable to access.
If the project is used with an access token that has sufficient permissions to
read private repositories, it may leak details about those repositories in
error messages. For example, the aiohttp library—used for asynchronous API
requests—may include the requested URL in exceptions, which can leak the name
of private repositories. If there is an exception caused by aiohttp, this
exception will be viewable in the Actions tab of the repository fork, and
anyone may be able to see the name of one or more private repositories.
Due to some issues with the GitHub statistics API, there are some situations where it returns inaccurate results. Specifically, the repository view count statistics and total lines of code modified are probably somewhat inaccurate. Unexpectedly, these values will become more accurate over time as GitHub caches statistics for your repositories. Additionally, repositories that were last contributed to more than a year ago may not be included in the statistics due to limitations in the results returned by the API.
For more information on inaccuracies, see issue #2, #3, and #13.
- Create a personal access token (not the default GitHub Actions token) using
the instructions
here.
Personal access token must have permissions:
read:userandrepo. Copy the access token when it is generated – if you lose it, you will have to regenerate the token.- Some users are reporting that it can take a few minutes for the personal access token to work. For more, see #30.
- Create a copy of this repository by clicking here. Note: this is not the same as forking a copy because it copies everything fresh, without the huge commit history.
- Go to the "Secrets" page of your copy of the repository. If this is the README of your copy, click this link to go to the "Secrets" page. Otherwise, go to the "Settings" tab of the newly-created repository and go to the "Secrets" page (bottom left).
- Create a new secret with the name
ACCESS_TOKENand paste the copied personal access token as the value. - It is possible to change the type of statistics reported by adding other
repository secrets.
-
To ignore certain repos, add them (in owner/name format e.g.,
jstrieb/github-stats) separated by commas to a new secret—created as before—calledEXCLUDED. -
To ignore certain languages, add them (separated by commas) to a new secret called
EXCLUDED_LANGS. For example, to exclude HTML and TeX you could set the value tohtml,tex. -
To show statistics only for "owned" repositories and not forks with contributions, add an environment variable (under the
envheader in the main workflow) calledEXCLUDE_FORKED_REPOSwith a value oftrue. -
To generate statistics for a GitHub organization, add a new secret called
ORGANIZATION_NAMEwith the name of the organization. Note that when this is set, the statistics will be for the organization and not the user. Also, thetotal_contributions,lines_changed, andviewsstatistics are not displayed for organizations. -
These other values are added as secrets by default to prevent leaking information about private repositories. If you're not worried about that, you can change the values directly in the Actions workflow itself.
-
New Performance Options: The Stats class now supports additional optional parameters for improved performance:
enable_cache=True- Enable file-based caching of API results (default: False)cache_ttl=3600- Cache time-to-live in seconds (default: 1 hour)include_views=False- Skip expensive view statistics (default: True)include_lines_changed=False- Skip expensive lines changed statistics (default: True)
These can be configured when initializing the Stats object in your custom scripts.
-
- Go to the Actions
Page and press "Run
Workflow" on the right side of the screen to generate images for the first
time.
- The images will be automatically regenerated every 24 hours, but they can be regenerated manually by running the workflow this way.
- Take a look at the images that have been created in the
generatedfolder. - To add your statistics to your GitHub Profile README, copy and paste the
following lines of code into your markdown content. Change the
usernamevalue to your GitHub username. 
 
- Link back to this repository so that others can generate their own statistics images.
- Star this repo if you like it!
Recent optimizations have significantly improved the performance of GitHub Stats:
-
Parallel API Calls: The
lines_changedandviewsproperties now useasyncio.gather()to fetch data from all repositories concurrently, resulting in 5-10x faster data collection for users with many repositories. -
Improved Connection Pooling: The default
max_connectionshas been increased from 10 to 50, allowing for 2-3x higher throughput when collecting statistics. -
Better Async Error Handling: Removed blocking synchronous fallbacks that could slow down the event loop. Operations now gracefully handle failures without blocking other requests.
-
Optional Caching: File-based caching with configurable TTL reduces redundant API calls. Enable it by passing
enable_cache=Truewhen creating a Stats object. -
Selective Statistics: You can now skip expensive operations like
viewsandlines_changedby settinginclude_views=Falseorinclude_lines_changed=False.
For a typical user with 50 repositories:
- Before: ~2-5 minutes to collect all statistics
- After: ~15-30 seconds with parallel execution
- With Caching: Near-instant on subsequent runs (within cache TTL)
These improvements are especially beneficial for users with many repositories or when running the workflow frequently.
There are a few things you can do to support the project:
- Star the repository (and follow me on GitHub for more)
- Share and upvote on sites like Twitter, Reddit, and Hacker News
- Report any bugs, glitches, or errors that you find
These things motivate me to keep sharing what I build, and they provide validation that my work is appreciated! They also help me improve the project. Thanks in advance!
If you are insistent on spending money to show your support, I encourage you to instead make a generous donation to one of the following organizations. By advocating for Internet freedoms, organizations like these help me to feel comfortable releasing work publicly on the Web.
- Inspired by a desire to improve upon anuraghazra/github-readme-stats
- Makes use of GitHub Octicons to precisely match the GitHub UI