How GitHub Trending works, and how to get on it

GitHub Trending lists the repositories getting the most attention right now, over a day, a week or a month, with filters for programming language and spoken language. A day on it can bring more visitors than a month of posting. GitHub has never published how the list is calculated, so everything below is what maintainers consistently observe, not a spec.

What it appears to reward

• Velocity, not size. Repos with tens of thousands of stars don’t sit on Trending permanently, and small repos appear on it all the time. The list behaves as if it ranks recent star growth, with total popularity counting for little.
• Growth against the repo’s own baseline. A repo that normally gets five stars a day and suddenly gets two hundred tends to show up, while a giant repo getting its usual few hundred often doesn’t. That fits a measure of how unusual today is for that repo.
• A short window. The daily view turns over fast. Stars spread across a month help the monthly view a little and the daily view not at all.
• Stars above everything else. Forks and other activity may count, but the repos that land there almost always arrive on a burst of stars.

How to get your repo on GitHub Trending

1. Concentrate your launch. Do Show HN, your social posts and your community posts on the same day, not across two weeks. You are trying to create one unusual day, not a steady trickle.
2. Get the language right. Each language has its own Trending list, and most are far less crowded than the all-languages view. GitHub detects a repo’s language with Linguist. If yours shows up as HTML or Jupyter Notebook because of a docs folder or examples, mark those paths linguist-documentation or linguist-vendored in .gitattributes so the real language wins.
3. Write the description for the card. The Trending card shows the repo name, its one-line description, its language and its star counts. That one line decides whether anyone clicks.
4. Be ready before the spike. A Trending visitor gives you seconds. Have the README pitch, a demo and a one-line install in place before launch day, not after.
5. Don’t fake it. Bought or traded stars break GitHub’s rules on rank abuse, and researchers who measured fake stars found they help only briefly. See how to get more GitHub stars.

Once you are on it

Trending feeds itself: being on the list brings stars, and stars keep you on the list. Use the window. Reply to issues within hours, merge small fixes quickly so the repo looks alive, and post a follow-up in the communities that got you there. Then plan for the day you drop off, because you will, usually within days.

Trending is a spike. Plan for the tail.

Trending is one of the best launch-day surfaces and one of the worst long-term ones: you can’t submit to it and you can’t stay on it. Pair it with places that keep a repo visible: awesome lists, newsletters, indexed posts and persistent boards. On RepoRanker, rows nobody has bought are ordered by stars gained since listing and recent pushes, so a Trending week still counts on a listed repo’s row after GitHub’s list has moved on. A place near the top starts at $3 and holds until someone spends more.

List your repo for free, or see how Trending compares with other launch surfaces on our comparison page.

Related: The best GitHub repo rankings · How to promote your GitHub repo · How to launch an open-source project in 2026.