I Built an API to Showcase Top Contributors on GitHub READMEs

Vishnu Nandan — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:14:40 +0000

I wanted a simple way to showcase the top contributors across all my GitHub repositories directly on my GitHub profile README.

Something like contrib.rocks, but across all repositories..

Surprisingly, I couldn't really find a clean solution for it.

Most existing tools were either:

repo-specific
difficult to self-host
dependent on live GitHub API scraping
heavily rate limited
or just abandoned

So I built one.

🏆 Top Contributors API

Website:
https://top-contributors-api.vercel.app/

How it looks like:

🤔 Why I Built It

Originally, I just wanted this for my own GitHub profile.

Something simple:

aggregate contributors across all repos
render avatars nicely
auto-update
easy to embed
no maintenance headaches

I assumed someone had already built it.

Apparently not.

Or at least not in the way I wanted.

So this became one of those:

“Fine, I'll build it myself.”

projects.

⚠️ The Real Problem Wasn't the Image

Rendering the image itself was easy.

The painful part was:

iterating through repositories
merging contributor data
pagination
GitHub API rate limits
serverless execution limits
caching
keeping response times fast

At first I tried doing everything live inside a Vercel API route.

Bad idea.

If a profile has enough repositories, the function can easily hit execution limits. And repeatedly querying GitHub on every request is basically asking to get throttled.

So I redesigned the architecture.

🧠 How It Works

1. GitHub Actions Handles Aggregation

A scheduled GitHub Actions workflow:

scans public repositories
aggregates contributor stats
generates a lightweight contributors.json
commits it back into the repository

It uses GitHub’s built-in GITHUB_TOKEN, so setup stays extremely simple.

2. Vercel Only Renders the Image

The API route:

reads the JSON file
renders contributor avatars using canvas
returns a PNG image

Which means:

fast response times
edge caching
minimal GitHub API usage
no live scraping during requests

Also, using PNGs avoids GitHub README SVG sanitization weirdness, which was another unexpected rabbit hole.

🔥 Two Versions

Main Version (Recommended)

Repository:
https://github.com/vishnunandan555/top-contributors-api

This version is meant for:

self-hosting
private usage
maximum reliability
zero public API dependency

Setup

Fork the repository
Enable GitHub Actions
Run the Aggregate Top Contributors workflow once
Deploy to Vercel
Use your Vercel Link

No environment variables required.
This avoids public rate limits entirely.

OTG Edition

This version provides a public API.
(you can find it in the website)

You just:

place your GitHub username in the URL
paste it into your README
done

Perfect for quick setup.

Because it's a shared public instance, it can get rate limited under heavy usage, although in normal usage it usually works fine.

📌 Future Plans

Currently the output is a static image.

One thing I really want to add is interactive contributor avatars, so clicking a contributor directly opens their GitHub profile.

📎 About Contribution Calculation

Currently, contributors are ranked using aggregated commit counts across repositories via GitHub’s contributors API.

Is commit count a perfect measure of contribution? Not really.

It ignores things like:

code reviews
issue triage
mentoring
discussions
documentation/design work

But commits are the most practical metric GitHub exposes that is fast, scalable, and reliable for an automated README widget.

In the future, I’d like to experiment with a smarter scoring system that can better represent contribution quality instead of just raw commit volume.

DEV Community: Vishnu Nandan