Stargazers Now on Homebrew

When I first released stargazers last year, installation meant cloning a repo and running pip install. That’s fine for Python developers, but it’s friction that doesn’t need to exist. As of today, stargazers is installable with a single command:

brew install wdm0006/tap/stargazers

This felt like the right milestone to do a proper launch post covering where the tool is now, since a lot has changed since the original announcement and the command restructuring update.

What Stargazers Does

Stargazers is a CLI tool for understanding who is interested in your GitHub projects. It fetches metadata about the people who star or fork your repos and gives you summaries and CSVs for further analysis.

The inspiration was a Cockroach Labs post from years ago where they correlated star growth with events like press coverage and conference talks. That analysis was fascinating but required a lot of custom scripting. Stargazers packages the data-gathering part into a single command.

Three Commands

Everything lives under the main stargazers command:

stargazers repos fetches stargazers for one or more repositories:

stargazers repos wdm0006/pygeohash wdm0006/elote

This outputs a CSV with each stargazer’s login, name, company, location, bio, follower count, and when they starred. For multiple repos, everything gets combined into a single file with a repo column.

stargazers forkers does the same for forks:

stargazers forkers wdm0006/pygeohash

stargazers account-trend is the newest command and probably the most useful. It analyzes star trends across your entire account over time:

stargazers account-trend wdm0006 --line-chart

This fetches star timestamps for all your owned repos, aggregates them by day, and shows cumulative growth. The --line-chart flag renders a chart right in the terminal using plotext. You can include or exclude specific repos:

stargazers account-trend wdm0006 \
  --include-repo scikit-learn-contrib/category_encoders \
  --exclude-repo wdm0006/some-old-repo

Rate Limiting

GitHub’s API has aggressive rate limits for unauthenticated requests (60/hour). Stargazers handles this gracefully with automatic backoff and retry, but setting a GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable bumps you to 5,000 requests/hour, which makes analyzing repos with hundreds of stargazers much more practical.

Install

The Homebrew formula handles the Python virtual environment and all dependencies automatically:

brew install wdm0006/tap/stargazers

If you prefer pip:

pip install git+https://github.com/wdm0006/stargazers.git

Or binary releases are available on GitHub.

Check out the repo: github.com/wdm0006/stargazers