dep-rank

Rank GitHub dependents by stars or trust.

dep-rank finds the most popular repositories that depend on a given GitHub project. It scrapes GitHub's dependents page, enriches results via the GraphQL API, and works as a command-line tool.

Quick Start

pip install dep-rank
dep-rank deps https://github.com/django/django

CLI Reference

dep-rank deps — List top dependents

dep-rank deps https://github.com/django/django
dep-rank deps https://github.com/django/django --rows 20 --min-stars 100
dep-rank deps https://github.com/django/django --descriptions --format json
dep-rank deps https://github.com/django/django --packages

dep-rank search — Search code in dependents

dep-rank search https://github.com/django/django "from django.db import"
dep-rank search https://github.com/django/django "middleware" --max-repos 20

search always runs a bounded non-adaptive top-K scrape (--no-adaptive-stop is not exposed; adaptive early-stop is permanently disabled for this command).

Partial results

A scrape result (deps, and the search pre-pass) reports whether it finished: results include a complete flag and a reason. complete: false means the scrape stopped early — max_pages_reached (raise --max-pages), trend_converged (the adaptive heuristic judged the top-K stable; use --no-adaptive-stop to scrape until exhaustion or --max-pages), network_failure, or rate_limited. total_count/filtered_count are then lower bounds across the pages actually scraped, not population totals.

dep-rank cache — Manage cache

dep-rank cache stats    # Show cache size
dep-rank cache clear    # Clear all cached data

Authentication

Set the DEP_RANK_TOKEN environment variable with a GitHub personal access token:

export DEP_RANK_TOKEN=ghp_your_token_here

A token is effectively required for non-trivial use: unauthenticated GitHub HTML scraping is limited to ~60 requests/hour per IP, so unauthenticated runs are suitable only for small one-off scrapes. Set DEP_RANK_TOKEN to raise the limit.

What works without a token:

• dep-rank deps — core scraping and star ranking

What requires a token:

• --descriptions flag — fetches repo descriptions via GitHub GraphQL API
• --rank-by trust — fetches engagement/recency metadata via GitHub GraphQL API
• --trust-check — adds authenticated REST star-history requests to trust ranking
• dep-rank search — code search across dependents

Create a token at github.com/settings/tokens with public_repo scope.

How It Works

dep-rank uses a three-stage pipeline:

1. Scrape — fetches GitHub's /network/dependents HTML pages to discover all dependents and their approximate star counts
2. Enrich (optional) — one GraphQL batch query fetches accurate star counts and descriptions for the top N results (replaces 100 individual REST API calls)
3. Present — returns structured results as a Rich table

Responses are cached in a local SQLite database (~/Library/Caches/dep-rank on macOS, $XDG_CACHE_HOME/dep-rank or ~/.cache/dep-rank on Linux, and %LOCALAPPDATA%\dep-rank\dep-rank\Cache on Windows) with ETag support for conditional requests. Expired pages are served immediately and refreshed in the background (stale-while-revalidate) on authenticated runs. Unauthenticated runs serve expired pages as-is and never refresh them; deps prints a notice on stderr when that happens. Set a token or run dep-rank cache clear for current results.

Trust Ranking

dep-rank deps --rank-by trust re-ranks dependents by a lightweight composite score instead of raw stars. Stars are useful but gameable; trust ranking blends stars with non-star signals — forks, total issues and pull requests, and recency of activity — fetched via low-cost GitHub GraphQL queries (batched at 100 repositories per request, so a larger pool issues more than one).

dep-rank deps https://github.com/django/django --rank-by trust --token ghp_...

Important caveats:

• The score is a pool-relative ranking signal, not an absolute quality score — it min-max normalizes signals across the scraped candidate set.
• It re-ranks only the scraped candidate pool (the star-top-N dependents), not every dependent.
• It is heuristic and does not detect fake stars. By default it does not fetch star history; --trust-check optionally samples it. Neither mode fetches GHArchive data or external fraud datasets.
• Trust ranking scrapes a larger candidate pool and is therefore deeper and slower than star ranking.
• --rank-by trust requires a GitHub token; trust scores appear in --format json output under each repo's trust field.

Star-history check

dep-rank deps https://github.com/django/django --rank-by trust --trust-check

This optional check samples the last 30 weeks of daily star counts for up to 25 top returned repositories, using GitHub's authenticated repository star-history API. It adds a concentrated_starring caution when the window contains at least 200 stars and at least 15% arrived on one day. It does not change trust scores or ranking. This is not proof of fake stars: launches and Hacker News spikes can match the same pattern. See StarScout and the research references below for the motivation and limits of star-based signals.

The table footer reports checked versus returned repositories, concentrated patterns, insufficient_history (fewer than 200 stars in the window), and unavailable (history could not be obtained). JSON adds top-level trust_check status only when the check is requested; for example (excerpt):

{
  "trust_check": {
    "complete": true,
    "window_weeks": 30,
    "repos_checked": 1,
    "insufficient_history": [],
    "unavailable": []
  },
  "repos": [{
    "trust": {
      "cautions": [{
        "code": "concentrated_starring",
        "description": "300 of 1,000 stars in the last 30 weeks arrived on 2026-09-01"
      }]
    }
  }]
}

trust_check.complete describes availability for the sampled repositories, not coverage of all results or all historical stars. Unavailable history makes it false and leaves the ranking usable. If trust ranking is unavailable, the check is skipped and the status reports the returned repositories as unavailable. The check uses no account-level signals: GitHub limited stargazer listings to repository admins and collaborators in July 2026; aggregate star history remains the basis of this check.

Caution signals

Trust-ranked results may carry informational caution signals, built from the same metadata fetch without extra requests by default. The optional --trust-check adds a star-history caution using separate requests. Signals appear in JSON under each repo's trust.cautions (a list of code + description, possibly empty) and, in the table, as a Cautions column shown only when at least one result has a signal.

Thresholds are fixed heuristics. Star floors stand in for a minimum sample size, and the low-activity signal requires forks and issues/PRs to be low together, because popular list and documentation repositories routinely have few issues. Missing metadata never produces a signal. Age-based signals are measured against the run's scraped_at time.

Caution signals are not proof of fake stars or malicious behavior. They flag patterns worth a closer look, and legitimate repositories — finished libraries, archived projects, a new tool that went viral — can match them. They do not change the trust score.

Motivation that stars are gameable comes from StarScout (repo, preprint, ICSE 2026). The low-resource API basis is the GitHub GraphQL rate-limit docs.

Development

# Prerequisites: Python 3.11+, uv
uv sync
uv run pytest
uv run ruff check .
uv run ruff format --check .
uv run mypy src tests

Acknowledgments

dep-rank is a full rewrite of ghtopdep by Andriy Orehov. The original project is licensed under MIT.

License

MIT — see LICENSE for details.