60 most popular JS repositories on GitHub in July and August 2020

For this digest, I reviewed more than 500 open-source JS projects on GitHub. And it was pretty hard to choose only 60. Sorry for the late update, but it is better than never.

You could have known and use many of these repositories before. But also, among these 60, you will find some new and brilliant stuff that can benefit your work or inspire you. Some of us were faster in creating nice stuff and earning stars on GitHub :).

Most popular JS repositories in July and August 2020

1. Hexo is a fast, simple, and powerful blog framework, powered by Node.js. 31,233 stars by now
2. Cypress is a fast, easy, and reliable testing for anything that runs in a browser. 23,041 stars by now
3. Hyperapp is a tiny framework for building hypertext applications. 18,089 stars by now
4. Insomnia is a cross-platform REST client, built on top of Electron. 14,405 stars by now
5. Handsontable is a JavaScript/HTML5 data grid with spreadsheet look & feel. Available for React, Vue and Angular. 14,157 stars by now
6. React Hook Form is a performant, flexible and extensible forms with easy to use validation. 13,970 stars by now
7. Karma is a simple tool that allows you to execute JavaScript code in multiple real browsers. 11,370 stars by now
8. GitHub Readme Stats repository is used for getting dynamically generated GitHub stats on your readmes. 9,713 stars by now
9. PostGraphile is a GraphQL API backed primarily by your PostgreSQL database. Highly customizable and extensible thanks to incredibly powerful plugin system. Formerly “PostGraphQL”. 9,380 stars by now
10. vmacintosh.js is a virtual Apple Macintosh with System 8, running in Electron (pretending to be a 1991 Macintosh Quadra). 6,580 stars by now
11. MQTT.js is a client library for the MQTT protocol, written in JavaScript for node.js and the browser. 5,770 stars by now
12. Tape is a tap-producing test harness for node and browsers. 5,371 stars by now
13. Prisma is a modern database access (ORM alternative) for Node.js & TypeScript | PostgreSQL, MySQL & SQLite. 5,154 stars by now
14. AutoCannon is a HTTP/1.1 benchmarking tool written in node, greatly inspired by wrk and wrk2, with support for HTTP pipelining and HTTPS. 4,125 stars by now
15. Clinic.js diagnoses your Node.js performance issues. 3,659 stars by now
16. React Sortable Tree is a React component for Drag-and-drop sortable representation of hierarchical data. Checkout the Storybook for a demonstration of some basic and advanced features. 3,647 stars by now
17. React-PDF is used to display PDFs in your React app as easily as if they were images. 3,618 stars by now
18. Super Expressive is a JavaScript library that allows you to build regular expressions in almost natural language — with no extra dependencies, and a lightweight code footprint (less than 4kb with minification + gzip). 3,587 stars by now
19. msv is a seamless REST/GraphQL API mocking library for browser and Node. 3,145 stars by now
20. Release is used to generate changelogs with a single command. When run, this command-line interface automatically generates a new GitHub Release and populates it with the changes (commits) made since the last release. 2,978 stars by now
21. Gitify is a GitHub notifications on your menu bar. Available on macOS, Windows and Linux. Gitify Mobile has been deprecated in favor of the official GitHub mobile app. 2,952 stars by now
22. ImmortalDB is a resilient key-value store for the browser. 2,816 stars by now
23. eslint-plugin-import is an ESLint plugin with rules that help validate proper imports. 2,740 stars by now
24. SurveyJS is a modern way to add surveys and forms to your website. It has versions for angular2+, jQuery, knockout, React, and Vue. 2,515 stars by now
25. Lad is the best Node.js framework. Made by a former Express TC and Koa team member. 1,887 stars by now
26. node-oracledb is an Oracle Database driver for Node.js maintained by Oracle Corp. 1,855 stars by now
27. file-type detects the file type of a Buffer/Uint8Array/ArrayBuffer. 1,793 stars by now
28. react-digraph is a React component that makes it easy to create a directed graph editor without implementing any of the SVG drawing or event handling logic. 1,777 stars by now
29. Middy is a very simple middleware engine that allows you to simplify your AWS Lambda code when using Node.js. 1,735 stars by now
30. Node-dev is a development tool for Node.js that automatically restarts the node process when a file is modified. 1,649 stars by now
31. Currency.js is a lightweight ~1kb JavaScript library for working with currency values. It was built to work around floating point issues in JavaScript. 1,649 stars by now
32. Tedious is a pure JavaScript implementation of the TDS protocol, which is used to interact with instances of Microsoft’s SQL Server. It is intended to be a fairly slim implementation of the protocol, with not too much additional functionality. 1,264 stars by now
33. Figma to Code is used to generate responsive pages and apps on Tailwind, Flutter, and SwiftUI. 1,341 stars by now
34. Dynamoose is a modeling tool for Amazon’s DynamoDB. 1,345 stars by now
35. XgeneCloud is an instant REST & GraphQL APIs on any Database. 1,248 stars by now
36. PgTyped makes it possible to use raw SQL in TypeScript with guaranteed type-safety. 1,186 stars by now
37. Testdouble.js is a minimal test double library for TDD with JavaScript. 1,171 stars by now
38. Kleur is a Node.js library for formatting terminal text with ANSI colors. 1,085 stars by now
39. Awesome Node.js Security resources. 1,072 stars by now
40. wait-on is a cross-platform command-line utility and Node.js API which will wait for files, ports, sockets, and http(s) resources to become available. 1,066 stars by now
41. Airtable.js is the Airtable API that provides a simple way of accessing your data. 1,063 stars by now
42. glyphhanger is your web font utility belt that can subset web fonts. It can show you what unicode-ranges are used on a web site (optionally per font-family) and also subset web fonts automatically using the unicode-ranges it found. 965 stars by now
43. BootBot is a simple but powerful JavaScript Framework to build Facebook Messenger’s Chat bots. 849 stars by now
44. Tiny-XSS-Payloads is a collection of short XSS payloads that can be used in different contexts. 825 stars by now
45. c8 is an output coverage reports using Node.js’ built-in coverage. 813 stars by now
46. NSFW Filter is a web extension that filters out NSFW images from websites. 803 stars by now
47. Twin helps you to use Tailwind classes within css-in-js libraries. 781 stars by now
48. Node-pg-migrate is a Node.js database migration management for Postgresql. 777 stars by now
49. fdir is a directory crawler and globbing library for NodeJS. Crawls 1m files in < 1s. 726 stars by now
50. use-web-animations is a React hook for highly-performant and manipulable animations using Web Animations API. 654 stars by now
51. 24a2 is a simple game engine that lets you build a game in a few hours. It has a very limited set of features which makes it easy to learn and encourages you to solve problems creatively. 632 stars by now
52. dequal is a tiny (304B to 489B) utility to check for deep equality. This module supports comparison of all types, including Function, RegExp, Date, Set, Map, TypedArrays, DataView, null, undefined, and NaN values. 608 stars by now
53. uuid-readable lets you generate easy to remember, readable UUIDs, that are Shakespearean and grammatically correct sentences. 577 stars by now
54. ePaper.js is a Node.js library for easily creating an ePaper display on a Raspberry Pi using HTML and Javascript. 555 stars by now
55. Watchr provides a normalized API the file watching APIs of different node versions, nested/recursive file and directory watching, and accurately detailed events for file/directory creations, updates, and deletions. 517 stars by now
56. Financial is a Zero-Dependency TypeScript / JavaScript financial utility library inspired by numpy-financial that can be used on Node.js, Deno and the browser. 498 stars by now
57. The N3.js library is an implementation of the RDF.js low-level specification that lets you handle RDF in JavaScript easily. 495 stars by now
58. crypto-hash is a tiny hashing module that uses the native crypto API in Node.js and the browser. 484 stars by now
59. bundle-wizard is a command-line utility that makes it simple to create visualizations of the JS bundles that were fetched for any specific page (or “entry point”) of a web app. 417 stars by now
60. nanogallery2 is a must-have gallery and lightbox. Strengths of nanogallery2 include rich UI interactions, multiple responsive layouts, swipe and zoom gestures, multi-level albums, an HTML page generator, and limitless options. 398 stars by now

Thank you for reading!

If you have interesting JS projects on GitHub — share them with me!

Comments

[Karen Efereyan]

Thanks Iren. Are they open source though? Can I contribute to them?

[Iren Korkishko]

Yes, all of them are. So, yes, basically, you are welcome to contribute to any of them.

[Karen Efereyan]

I already forked hexo. I try to understand the codebase then find an issue to tackle. Have you been contributing to hexo? Can I ask you for help?

[Iren Korkishko]

Nope, I haven’t contributed to hexo, unfortunately. But you can ask any of the contributors on GitHub. Have you tried to contact some of them?

[Karen Efereyan]

I haven't. I guess I'll need to

[Tobias Nickel]

cool, would be interesting to see over time. if you share next month again, maybe we can see some trends.

I am happy to see hexo on as number one, because my blog is running well with it.

And now I will check out Clinic.js, that is new to me, and might be a good fit into my current situation.

[Aleks Popovic]

This is very useful! Bookmarked!

[Michael Burrows]

Just started using #4 Insomnia and would highly recommend for testing APIs as an alternative to Postman.

[Muhammad Uzair]

Awesome stuff 😱.

[Andrew Baisden]

Another electron app in the top 5 in Insomnia. Despite the fact that people say it's a performance hog so many popular apps are built with it. Like VS Code the most popular IDE.