How to get more stars on Github

How to make your open source project popular? How to prepare repositories to make them tasty?

Hi all! My name is Daniil Okhlopkov and I am a creator of Instabot — open source tools and scripts for Instagram automation and promotion. Right now this organization has 1,500+ stars on GitHub across all our repositories. I also have a huge amount of small projects that gave me 300+ stars too.

In this article, I’d like to show how I cook the repositories to make them attractive enough to earn stars.

In Morejust we do like to opensource everything we can and don’t like to just drop lines of code to the graveyard called GitHub: we want others to understand the idea of a project or even try to run our buggy thing. Go check how all the methods from this article work in practice.

TL;DR:

1. Create Readme with Documentation on several languages
2. Create landing pages with GitHub Pages
3. Create community and analyze the competitors

After I wrote this article, I realized that this is mainly about how to attract more users to your project. This can be used not only for the open-source project, so enjoy. :)

Readme

Don’t underestimate the power of a Readme.md! In this small but powerful file you should have answers to all these questions:

these things may be quite obvious, but stillllll

1. What problem may be solved with this code? Who are the users? (hahaha, classic questions to any project)
2. How to run all of this? Prepare installation guide and at least one example usage script.
3. How to contribute to your project? You may be surprised but not only developers would like to contribute to the project. Feel free to ask them to sign up on GitHub and put a star on your project. In my case, the non-coders helped me to translate the documentation to 7 different languages by the community. This helped to attract even more non-coders. And stars.

You may already have seen a lot of badges at the top of Readme.md file with things like CI status, Code coverage, Donate links, Community chats, etc. That’s right — try to add them too, they would attract more users and make your repo’s main page less boring.

These tiny monsters do their job

Good Readme text should also attract visitors from search engines to your code. Don’t forget to add a description and tags to your repo too — they can help give you slightly more traffic from GitHub itself.

keywords! keywords! keywords!

Documentation

Add as much documentation texts as you can, because you will face a huge amount of really silly questions that already have an answer if you ask Google (yep, people usually don’t like to Google anything. That’s sad, I know). Good documentation will not only save you time answering community questions but also attract more users from search engines.

Since I’ve prepared large documentation, I used Google Translate to add more languages and attract even more users. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, and punctuation: my community fixed all the text problems they found.

To attract even more users, try to record a how-to video (people really like videos instead of instructions text). Also, you can write an article on Medium, Dev.to, etc. to increase your search engine traffic. That really works! (btw, you are reading the article right now — it definitely works).

GitHub Pages

Traffic sources for Instabot project. You can find these stats for any repo you own.

It is so easy to create a simple landing page for your project that will attract visitors to your repository from search engines that will generate you more stars on a project.

To create a basic webpage, you don’t have to know HTML & CSS: just edit texts and pics in any static sites template. You also can try Jekyll if you don’t even want to touch the code (but I don’t like it because I want to control everything by myself). If you are familiar with HTML & CSS, it is so easy to create a landing from scratch using CSS tools like Bootstrap or Semantic UI (I really liked the design and the tutorial of it — definitely recommended).

The basic things that can easily improve your landing position in Google (SEO for dummies):

I share the link — It comes with fancy text and a free picture! Thanks to html metatags.

• Add HTML metatags to all your pages — they specify the information Google would show and how to beautify shared links
• Add Sitemap.xml — it helps search engines to crawl all your pages.

GitHub can host static files for free, it means that all backend-less apps can be served straight from their GitHub repository. If you are a React or Vue.js developer and need to build your files before serving them, you can use Travis-CI which is free for all open source projects.

Perfect SEO — lots of visitors

Community

Create a place where anyone can ask questions about your code, just chat about relative topics and receive code updates ASAP. Nowadays, we can do this anywhere: Facebook group, Telegram Messenger chat & channel, any other Social media platform. If your project is for coders only (or at least for people who should have a GitHub account) you may try Gitter https://gitter.im/ — it allows to chat via browser and log in using your GitHub account only.

If you would be lucky enough, you may meet there some early-adopters or even co-founders that can help you with additional feature ideas or even with the code itself. After your community becomes large enough, a lot of questions would be answered by participants as well, so you would not spend a lot of time chatting.

Try not to hesitate to ask contributors to create a pull request with their new functionalities or example scripts. Also, check and test their code thoroughly (otherwise, your project users may suffer from poor-written code — the problem I faced in Instabot).

Just Donation GIF From Giphy

Don’t be afraid to add a donation button to your project. It was a very surprising fact for me that some people all over the world really want to buy a coffee for a developer that made their lives easier. There are a lot of ways to collect international donations: PayPal, Patreon, BuyMeaCoffee. Donations can’t make you rich, but they can keep you motivated to continue the development and supplied with deserves coffee :)

If there are similar projects to yours, you can find more early adopters and ideas in “competitors” communities. Take a look at issues and feature requests — you may also find there what really matters for your target audience and make them happy.

UPD: 2023–08–29

Github Stars hunting is on the rise. Check out these guys to know more about how to get 20k stars on Github: How to get GitHub stars.

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Thank you for reading this article! If you found it useful, please clap several times — that will motivate me to write more. Follow my adventures on Linkedin: we are Morejust open-source hackers. More stories will come. Subscribe. Donate. Love.