GitHub Adds Privacy-Safe Star History REST API Endpoint

What shipped

GitHub shipped a new REST endpoint on September 4, 2026 that returns repository star history — growth over time with timestamps, without exposing any stargazer's identity.

What changed

GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/stargazers/history (documented under REST API version 2026-03-10) returns weekly buckets, newest first:

[
  {"week": 1788048000, "total": 181, "days": [21,25,39,21,28,20,27]}
]

Week timestamp, count for the week, seven daily counts. Same shape as the commit activity feed, so existing charting code ports over in minutes. A companion GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/stargazers/count returns {"count": N} for the current total. I pulled both live against vercel/next.js — they work.

Context: earlier this year GitHub restricted stargazer listing endpoints to admins and collaborators to protect user privacy, which broke every star-growth tracker built on that list. This is the sanctioned replacement.

Why a builder cares

If your dashboard tracked competitor repos or your own project's growth by paging through stargazers, that data access is not coming back — this endpoint is the restore path, and the trade is explicit: you get the trend, GitHub keeps the people. Aggregate-only APIs are the new deal on platforms that got burned by scraping. Build your metrics on counts, not identities, because identity-level access can be revoked on any given Tuesday.