Showcase Your GitHub Repository’s Users in the README [< 5 Mins]

If you’ve ever published a library on GitHub, you’ve probably noticed that GitHub shows a nice sidebar section on some repositories — "Used by X repositories" — giving your project social proof and discoverability.

Unfortunately, this info is only visible if 100+ repositories depend on your project.

That sucks because I maintain several open source libraries like jekyll-auto-authors that have dozens of real users and I'd love to showcase that information despite the thresholds.

So I built dependents.info — a simple tool that shows your network dependents right inside your README!

Watch a quick demo

How it works

The idea is simple: dependents.info is a GitHub Action written in TypeScript + a Go based API that together generate a SVG image showing which repositories depend on your package.

Just like contrib.rocks, but for network dependents.

The tech stack:

• GitHub Action in TypeScript: Crawls your repository’s network dependents and sends them to the backend.
• API in Go (Fiber): Authenticates using GitHub OIDC to verify requests, stores data, and generates a minimal SVG image with avatars and names of top users.

Features

• Works for any public GitHub repository.
• Secure: uses GitHub’s built-in OIDC to verify authenticity.
• Shows top 10 dependent repos (sorted by stars).
• Live SVG badge, embeddable in any README.
• Supports a lot of configurations.
• Robust caching and rate-limit friendly.
• Minimal setup: just a few lines in a .yml GitHub workflow.

Setup

1. Add a GitHub Action to your repository:

Add this simple workflow file to your repository's .github/workflows folder.

dependents.yml

name: Dependents Action

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  dependents:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      id-token: write
    steps:
      - uses: gouravkhunger/dependents.info@main

1. Copy the following code snippet below and replace owner/repo with your repository's name. paste it wherever you want to embed the image.

<a href="https://github.com/owner/repo/network/dependents">
  <img src="https://dependents.info/owner/repo/image.svg" />
</a>

Made with [dependents.info](https://dependents.info).

As soon as you push these changes, you'll see the image inserted automatically!

See It Live

• Website: https://dependents.info

• GitHub:
  

  gouravkhunger / dependents.info

  easily generate an image of github network dependents to showcase in your project's readme

  dependents.info

  easily generate an image of github network dependents to showcase in your project's readme.md file.

  simply add a github action to your repository and use the image link for your repo.

  demo

  here's a demo of the generated image for the gem jekyll-auto-authors:

  
  
  

  quickstart

  github action

  add this file to your repository's .github/workflows folder.

  dependents.yml

  name: Dependents Action
  
  on:
    push:
      branches: [main]
    workflow_dispatch:
  
  jobs:
    dependents:
      runs-on: ubuntu-latest
      permissions:
        id-token: write
      steps:
        - uses: gouravkhunger/dependents.info@main

  once you push this file, the action will process the dependents for the repository and the api will generate the image.

  tip: instead of running the action on push, you can use a cron job to schedule the action.

  configuration (optional)

  add the following options to your dependents.yml file if you want to customize the action's behavior:

    - uses: gouravkhunger/dependents.info@main

  …

  View on GitHub

Got ideas or feature requests? Drop them on the repo — contributions and feedback are super welcome.

Hope this project helps bring visibility to your packages, no matter how big or small!

Happy coding :)

— Gourav