Quick Tip: Fetch GitHub Stargazers Count (and More) at Build Time

Older iterations of this website used a third party JavaScript widget to show the number of GitHub Stars the project currently had. You can see it in action on the versioned docs for 0.7.1 (scroll to the bottom).

This was in fact the only <script> tag on the entire 11ty.dev web site and it was from a third party. Naturally, it needed to be annihilated.

Let’s change up our architecture to ruthlessly eliminate this client-side JavaScript.

Get the Stargazers Count from the GitHub API

Read more at the GitHub API documentation.

This is a bit different from our client-side implementation because this data is only updated as often as your build runs. This is implemented using a global JavaScript data file at _data/github.js.

• Install new dependencies: npm install node-fetch
• Read more about node-fetch
• It’s better to use the Eleventy Fetch utility instead, which will cache your fetch results to avoid hitting the GitHub API on every build.
  • Related Quick Tip: Cache Data Requests

import fetch from "node-fetch";

export default async function () {
	console.log("Fetching new github stargazers count…");

	// GitHub API: https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/#get
	let res = await fetch("https://api.github.com/repos/11ty/eleventy");
	let json = await res.json();

	// prune the data to return only what we want
	return {
		stargazers: json.stargazers_count,
	};
};

const fetch = require("node-fetch");

module.exports = async function () {
	console.log("Fetching new github stargazers count…");

	// GitHub API: https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/#get
	let res = await fetch("https://api.github.com/repos/11ty/eleventy");
	let json = await res.json();

	// prune the data to return only what we want
	return {
		stargazers: json.stargazers_count,
	};
};

Now in your templates you can output the stargazers count with:

{{ github.stargazers }} GitHub Stars

which outputs

1515 GitHub Stars

Bonus: I created a humanReadableNum filter) using the human-readable-numbers package to format the number.

More Examples

You can look in the footer of this page to see examples of this in use on this very web site. I used it for:

• NPM Download Count
• GitHub Stargazers Count
• Twitter Followers Count (careful here, this one is super brittle but Twitter’s API is historically anti-developer so 😇)

These all use the recommended caching mechanism described in the next section.

Recommended: Cache the Data to the File System

Update Counts Daily

If you want to update these counts automatically every day, read Quick Tip #008—Trigger a Netlify Build Every Day with IFTTT.

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