Filter GitHub’s search API by creation date and sort the results yourself by stars per day since creation. A gain over the last seven days does not work for new repositories, because a repository that is younger than seven days has no count from seven days ago to compare with.
Why does the search stop at 1,000 results?
Because GitHub caps every search there. The REST documentation says the API provides “up to 1,000 results for each search”, at most 100 per page, and allows “up to 30 requests per minute for all search endpoints” when authenticated (GitHub Docs, REST API endpoints for search, checked 9 October 2026).
We ran into it directly: one of our searches for recently created repositories reported 22,539 matches, and page 11 at 100 results per page answered with status 422 instead of results (measured between 2 and 20 September 2026). If you want more than the first thousand, split the query into narrower creation windows, for example one per day, and stay below 30 requests per minute.
Stars per day or growth?
Stars per day since creation, for repositories that are new. Growth compares today’s count with an earlier count, and for a new repository that earlier count does not exist.
In our measurements from 2 to 20 September 2026, all 21 of 21 repositories in the 7-day creation window were younger than seven days, so none had a count from a week before. In the 30-day window, 87 of 209 repositories had no comparison count, and in the 90-day window 145 of 1,003. A list sorted by growth silently drops exactly the repositories you are looking for. Stars divided by days since created_at needs no history and ranks a two-day-old repository fairly against a two-month-old one.
Which time windows work?
Windows of 7, 30 and 90 days since creation, read as separate lists. The 7-day list is small and noisy, 21 repositories in our measurement; the 30-day list, 209 repositories, is where a project that keeps its pace becomes visible; the 90-day list, 1,003 repositories, already hits the search cap and needs to be split by date.
gitpuls works the same way: it stores one star count per repository and day, ranks the repositories of each window (7, 30 and 90 days since creation) by stars per day since creation, and shows the gain over seven days only next to it, where a count from seven days ago exists.
How this text was written
This article was drafted with an AI assistant from our own measurements and the sources linked above, which were checked on 9 October 2026. The numbers come from the method page; nothing was estimated.