METHODOLOGY
How Warpchart measures open source. Every number on the site is derived from public GitHub data through a transparent method, with the limits stated plainly. If a figure cannot be known honestly, Warpchart does not invent it.
What is Warpchart?
Warpchart is a developer tool that ranks every public GitHub repository by worldwide star rank and growth velocity, live and free. It answers, for any repo, where it stands among all of GitHub, how fast it is climbing, and which repositories are closing in on it.
Where does the data come from?
Only public GitHub data, read through GitHub's official GraphQL and REST APIs. Warpchart adds no private or proprietary inputs. Every public page reads daily-refreshed caches, so browsing never burns GitHub quota.
How is worldwide rank computed?
Once a day Warpchart records the star distribution of the worldwide top of GitHub (the top ~10,000 repositories). A repository's worldwide rank is its position by star count within that recorded distribution. Below the recorded band the rank is an estimate; inside it, it is exact for that day.
How is growth velocity (stars per day) computed?
The headline velocity is a trailing 7-day rate: the change in stars over the last seven days, divided by seven, computed from the recorded daily distribution. A 7-day window is used deliberately because a 1-day rate is noisy; seven days is stable enough to compare repositories fairly.
How are overtake ETAs and the race projected?
An ETA is a straight projection: the star gap between two repositories divided by the difference in their velocities. It assumes today's pace holds, so it is an estimate, not a promise — it moves as the pace moves. A meeting is only projected when the repository that is behind is the faster one.
How fresh are the numbers, and how often do they update?
The worldwide distribution is recorded once a day. The collector refreshes the registry roughly every two hours. A tracked repository's own history is sampled hourly. Public dossiers are cached for about 15 minutes. So a repository's live counters are minutes old; its worldwide-rank history advances one point per day.
Why does the worldwide-rank history only go back a few days for some repos?
Worldwide rank requires a snapshot of the entire distribution on a given day, and Warpchart can only show it from the day it started recording that distribution. It is un-backfillable: nobody, including Warpchart, can reconstruct a repository's worldwide rank for a day before recording began. The history grows by one point every day. A repository's raw star history, by contrast, goes back to its creation.
Is a star the same as an endorsement?
No. A star is a signal of attention, not always of validated use. Warpchart pairs stars with derived signals — velocity, fork ratio, real installs and clones where available — precisely because the raw count alone can mislead.
Who builds and runs Warpchart?
Warpchart is built and maintained by Santiago Fernández (santifer on GitHub). It is open source under the MIT license and can be self-hosted; the public console you see is the same code anyone can run.
Do you sell the data?
No. The data is never for sale at any price. The paid product sells operations — hosting the collector, keeping exact hourly history, and preserving the traffic GitHub deletes every 14 days. Paying never changes a single number on any public chart.