9 Steps to Get 100 Stars on GitHub

We should start off with proof that this works. Here's a screenshot of the recent viewer analytics for my GitHub repo, which has just started to take off:

It's clear from this chart that I spent a little while trying to get stars in ways that flat-out don't work before I found the ways that do. I'm here to help you cut through the crap and focus on the methods that work.

1. Create a READ-ME with a pretty top section

Your READ-ME file is like your repo’s homepage. A good percentage of people will star your project just because it looks good, and not all users will scroll down past the top of your READ-ME, so make the top part as pretty as possible. Here’s how to create a READ-ME, and here’s a place to practice your markdown if needed. A recipe for success is a well-designed logo with a tagline underneath followed by shields and then a colorful splash image. Here's what I did with my repo; it's animated, so you can click here if you care to see it live:

2. Be concise

People have incredibly short attention spans. Cut all the excess wording out of your READ-ME and get down to brass tacks. If possible, show the user how to use your project in a quick gif. Here’s how to record your screen on a Mac and PC. Here’s the best online video to gif converter I’ve found.

3. Choose an open license

People don’t like when you’re selling them something. If possible, create a license for your repo that opens it up for free use. I chose the “Unlicense License”. This will be featured next to your READ-ME, and people will see it.

4. Have stars

It’s weird, but people are more willing to star your project if they see that others have already done so. Ask your friends to star your project to get the ball rolling. Do not create fake GitHub accounts to star your own project. GitHub will catch you after about 4 accounts, guaranteed.

5. Upload an eye-catching social card

When people share a link to your GitHub repo, it’ll be accompanied by whatever image you choose for your social card. Make it colorful enough to pop off the screen and provocative enough to be worth a click. Here’s how to upload one.

6. Advertise

There are a lot of platforms to post your project to for free. The ones that have worked best for my JavaScript-based repo (in order) are r/javascript, r/webdev, and r/npm on Reddit; Cooperpress- which runs the the biggest coding email newsletters (contact here); Dev.to; Hada News; Echo JS; Hacker News; Product Hunt; Twitter; Facebook; and LinkedIn. Lobsters is an invitation-only community that I don't have an in with yet, but you can post there as well if you do. If your repo is JavaScript-based like mine, you can also post to JavaScripting once you reach 80 stars. Even interacting with other users' repos on GitHub through contributions/stars/follows can lead to visits to your own repo. Don't overdo it with GitHub interactions though; you'll get flagged or banned or spam.

7. Engage in developer communities

Once you advertise on these communities, connect with people on them. They won’t find you unless you give them a reason to care that you exist. Find articles on Dev.to you like and actually like them/leave comments. Star projects on GitHub and contribute to other projects. Like and retweet people on Twitter.

8. Respond to feedback

People will respond to your posts on these communities with advice. Tell them that you’ve heard them and actually change your project to fit what the public wants. They’re explicitly telling you how to make the project worth starring, so listen.

9. Shout-out your supporters

Users are more likely to star/fork your repo if there's something in it for them. You can reward them by automatically displaying their username and avatar in your README with Repo Roster. Just paste a link to your repo into the website, and copy the resulting markdown into your README.

And a bonus...

You’re also welcome to leave your project in the comments here for others to check out, but please don’t just drop a spammy-looking link. Include your repo’s title and description with the link so people can get a sense of it at a glance. Something like "Rando.js is a micro-library that simplifies and secures randomness in JavaScript" is perfect. I’ll check them out too!

Comments

[Ben Halpern]

Nice post. The first 100 stars are most certainly the most important 100, and while stars and attention are perhaps a shallow indication of true value, we are humans and we need signals like this sometimes. 😄

[Prahlad Yeri]

Motivation is very important, especially for FOSS contributors as other kinds of motivations like salary or pension aren't available. More GitHub social indicators means they'll be more motivated to solve bugs and issues in the project. It also means more visibility of that project to other organisations who support/donate based on social indicators.

[Saeid Rezaei]

Send signal to me ;)
Swift Persian Tools is an anthology of a variety of tools for the Persian language in Swift.

[WizMiles]

It is, getting first 100 stars is the hardest part of the open source project.

[Matteo Bianchi]

What do you think about my repository? I've done my best.
github.com/PalmetteJS/Palmette-js
npmjs.com/package/palmette-js

[Rahul Jain]

Such an amazing post. I followed each and every step and honestly my project readme looks more simpler and cooler than ever. Have a look

rahuldkjain / minimal-portfolio

💪 A clean, minimal, responsive, and customizable portfolio template to showcase skills, experience, achievements, and favorites (movies & TVs).

💪 Awesome Personal Portfolio

The minimal, responsive and easily customisable portfolio for developers.

⚡ Pages

🎯 Home (Introduction, Skills, Contact me)

🎯 Work (Internships, Projects, Miscellaneous Projects)

🎯 Achievements And Certifications

🎯 Favourites (Movies, TV/ Web Shows)

🚀 Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

You'll need Git and Node.js (which comes with npm) installed on your computer.

node@v10.16.0 or higher
npm@6.9.0 or higher
git@2.17.1 or higher

🔧 How To Use

From your command line, clone and run minimal-portfolio:

# Clone this repository
$ git clone https://github.com/rahuldkjain/minimal-portfolio.git

# Go into the repository
$ cd minimal-portfolio

# Install dependencies
$ npm install

# Run 
$ npm run dev

🛠️ Customize

If you like the portfolio and want to use it to create your own, please refer customization manual.

🧑‍💻 Technologies used

• Vuejs
• SCSS
• …

View on GitHub

[MuttisSalat]

Thanks for sharing on how to get Github Stars and GitHub Followers. We used GitHub24 and GitHub-Stars in order to get a GitHub Stars and GitHub Followers.

[nastyox]

It looks awesome. Nice work! Remember, the next step is networking on various platforms so people can see it and give you feedback about the functionality.

[Rahul Jain]

Yeah will definitely do that. Thanks

[WizMiles]

Can't find your page anymore :(

[abser]

How did you do it, It looks so great!

[Rahul Jain]

That gif was developed using gsap animation library.

[abser]

Wow!!!! Thank you very much for sharing such a good way. It is admirable that you can share such amazing tools. Can you share your experience or examples, I appreciate it.

[Anatoly Scherbakov]

I would like feedback to ysv. This is a command line program which reads CSV data from stdin and accepts a configuration file name as a command line argument. Its job is to create a new CSV file based on that configuration. Example configuration:

version: 1
columns:
  year:
    - input: year
  make:
    - input: make
    - uppercase
    - replace:
        MERCEDES-BENZ: MERCEDES
  model:
    - input: model
    - uppercase

The purpose is to simplify ETL jobs and clean data before it gets into a database. Stage of development is very early, as is my level of understanding Rust.

I have seen that a lot of tedious work has to be done to clean up data, standardize column names and formats, and this tool aims to resolve that pain using a simple DSL.

[P-bibs]

The trouble I have is that as a developer first and a designer second (if at all) I have trouble making nice graphics to promote my stuff (kudos to you by the way, the rando.js graphics are gorgeous).
I recently made a website Mix Capsule (auto-generate time-capsule playlists on Spotify) and added as much styling/branding as I could to the website and the repo but am struggling to make it as nice as some projects I see here. I'm wondering if people have general tips for programmers turned designers or anything specific to my case?

[nastyox]

Thank you! If creativity is the problem, I would suggest finding styles you like on a mix of other sites and basically copying them while tweaking things to match your own brand. At that point, it's just a matter of being good enough with CSS and whatever graphic software you use to get the job done. It's really nice if you can find a designer to work with so you only have to worry about the technical application, but you can scrape by without one.

[P-bibs]

Thanks for the advice! I'll poke around and see what I can find for inspiration.

[nastyox]

Something like this (not mobile responsive)? I could help out more with the frontend if you'd like it or not if you prefer to do things yourself! Seemed like a fun thing for my free time.

[P-bibs]

Wow that's quite the makeover thanks! I especially like the svg waves and animated logo, definitely not things I would have thought to do myself. I think I can take it from here, but I'll certainly use yours as inspiration if you don't mind.

[nastyox]

Good luck with it; I'll check back at a later date to see how the project's growing!

[Mike Talbot ⭐]

Great advice, I'm going to add a nice logo to js-coroutines as it's currently looking rather sad! I made an effort with the website but less so on the GitHub. Can't seem to get JavaScript Weekly interested sadly.

[nastyox]

Very cool! You've got one of those projects that's useful enough to get stars no matter what. It looks great!

[Mike Talbot ⭐]

Done haha.

[nastyox]

Really well done. Nice work!

[Bhavesh Lohana]

Wow, that's really great! I'd love to know how you made this.:)

[Brookes]

Very useful. Have a star!

[Mike Talbot ⭐]

Thanks! :)

[calvintwr]

Very cool. I gave a star too! This post earns you stars too lol.

Can I steal a question? I thought that async functions don’t block main threads... so anything running inside of the async function shouldn’t too?

[Mike Talbot ⭐]

Hey Calvin thanks!

So async functions just wait for each of the operations and then block the main thread again. I wrote the following that shows how js-coroutines works and why it makes a big difference.

60fps Javascript while you stringify, parse, process, compress and filter 100Mbs of data

Mike Talbot ・ May 25 '20 ・ 9 min read

#javascript #webdev #react

[Patrick]

Thanks for the post! Starred your repo as many in the comments 😄. I like the shadow image on your readme. Looks better than the regular shadow. Which tool do you use to create the moving shapes in your gif logo?

Find a python webhook repo for people who want to create fb messenger bots below:

[nastyox]

Thanks! If you look at the rando.js website and inspect the shape shifter at the top of the page, you'll see how I coded it with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery. From there, I just recorded it using QuickTime on my mac, and used the video to gif converter I mentioned in this article. I used the same method for the demo gif! The code environment in that gif isn't even functional. Just for looks!

[Patrick]

Thanks for the tip. Will check the source bits it out.

[Dani Tseiltin]

Nice post, I will try it out!
Also, npm-package-deployer is a NPM package that helps you release versions of your NPM packages. You can also automate the process via GitHub Actions!
Feel free to read my post about it here if you're interested.

[nastyox]

Repo looks awesome

[Dani Tseiltin]

Thanks! I made some changes to it according to this cool post! i've been developing projects here and there and I really wanted to make them more visible!
I'll be adding more gifs and so to it to make it even cooler!
Thanks a lot for this awesome post!!

[Gan Jun Kai]

Nice tips! Let me promote some of my projects (and I wish I can reach more people with my works that I work really hard to make):

• obsidian: A Rust web framework which we aim to make it more developer-friendly (as people always say Rust is hard to learn). It is still on an early stage, and we are discussing about how do we make it become a productivity tool for developers.
• aion: A friendly Rust utility crate for duration and datetime.

// It allows you to write the duration and datetime like this
2.days(); // Duration for 2 days
2.seconds(); // Duration for 2 seconds
2.hours().from_now(); // Datetime for 2 hours from now
7.days().ago(); // Datetime for 1 week ago
1.weeks().ago(); // Datetime for 1 week ago

• redux-flipper and flipper-plugin-redux-debugger: a redux middleware for debugging your redux state in React Native and Flipper

[Anatoly Scherbakov]

This is one great DSL to express datetime values! Looks very nice and readable.

[Gan Jun Kai]

Thanks! This is inspired by Ruby on Rails where in Rails you only need to write 1.day.ago (without parenthesis). It is even english-ish.

[Jakub T. Jankiewicz]

Nice article I've added two of my projects to JavaScripting. sysend.js library that allow to send messages between open tabs or windows including cross domain. and jQuery Terminal. I have also another project I would like to share which is LIPS Scheme based language written in JavaScript. I need to add logo to master branch README as well, it will be awhile until I'll made 1.0 version that I'm working on in devel branch.

[Nik Martin]

Why isn't #1 "make something that people want to use"?

[nastyox]

My goal with this article is to help people improve their repos, and if they can't figure that one out on their own, I don't know if I could help them. I'd call that #0 on the list. Certainly the most important. Also kind of ties in with #8.