TLDR: GitStars Github, Documentation, and New Badges.

Developers love badges. For these reason there are a ton of different Github Badges websites that let you build out your own badges for your projects. Most of them have the same issue though- they stop working quickly due to the Github API Ratelimiting, which only allows 60 requests each hour if you’re calling it directly from the browser.

I also love badges, and wanted them to work for my new portfolio page. The problem is that with almost forty projects I was hitting that ratelimit pretty hard, to the point where refreshing the page once was enough to do it.

So I made my own API, GitStars, which I am now sharing with all of you.

GitStars has a few features that make it nice for front end development-

No Ratelimit- if a project has been loaded once it will always load again after.

Smaller Responses as the service strips out data (such as URLs) that can be easily generated.

Faster Responses due to caching- most responses come from SQLite rather than calling Github, returning responses in about 20ms.

Higher Resilience, as it will return cached results when errors occur.

Browser Caching, as various headers (such as Expires) are added. This speeds up page reloads significantly.

Easy Migration since the service mirrors the Github API endpoints and responses. Changing “api.github.com” to “stars.gitconsensus.com” will work for most projects.



As part of this project I also launched gitbuttons.tedivm.com, which forks a popular github badges project and has it use this new API.

GitStars is available now on Github and at stars.gitconsensus.com.