How to find the created date of a repository project on GitHub?

If you are not interested in the exact creation date, and just would like to know how old a repo roughly is. You can go to Insights, then Contributors. For example, first commit for react was pushed on May 26 2013.


How can I find the created date of a project on GitHub?

Use the Repos GitHub API to retrieve this information

  • Syntax: https://api.github.com/repos/{:owner}/{:repository}
  • Example: https://api.github.com/repos/libgit2/libgit2sharp

The JSON payload will expose a created_at member with the UTC date the repository was created.

Considering the LibGit2Sharp repository above, one can see that it's been created on Feb, 2nd 2011 at 16:44:49 UTC.

Note: The created_at won't necessarily reflect the date of the first commit. It's the date the repository has been created on GitHub. For instance, the xunit/resharper-xunit project was recently moved from codeplex to GitHub. The created_at date is 2014-05-01T11:17:56Z, but the most of the commits date back much more farther than that.


I've written a bookmarklet for this, It may come in handy. You can even know the details of private or private - organization repositories with a simple workaround.

GitHub repository size, creation date bookmarklet | Source Code

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@nulltoken's answer is very useful. To make it even more convenient, I decided to create a chrome extension for displaying a date of creation of a repository.

Highlights

  • Beautiful calendar icon in the summary bar on a repository page
  • Customizable date format followed Moment format pattern
  • Best performance by storing all fetched URIs in the Storage

Date of creation of a repository is displaying on the summary bar:

landpage

Date format is customizable by clicking at the extension icon:

option

This's working really well for me. I hope it's useful for you as well.

Tags:

Github

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