GitHub Has Restricted Access to Star Data

GitHub is restricting its stargazers API — the endpoint that returns who starred a repository and when. As announced on June 30, 2026, access to this data is being limited to a repository's own admins and collaborators.

Star History reconstructs a project's growth curve from exactly this data. So for any repository you don't own or collaborate on, an authenticated request to GitHub now returns "Not Found," and the chart can't be built.

Here is exactly what is and isn't impacted:

Impacted

• Live star history charts embedded in README files — for essentially every repository, since our servers fetch the data and aren't a collaborator on your repo either.
• Charts on star-history.com for repositories you don't own or collaborate on.

Not impacted

• Viewing a repository you own or collaborate on, on star-history.com, with your own access token that has the public_repo scope.

One caveat here: we previously suggested creating a token with no scopes, and those tokens no longer work — even for your own repositories. If you have one, recreate it with the public_repo scope.

What it is not

It has nothing to do with repository size — a 300-star repo you don't collaborate on fails the same way a 200,000-star one does. And you can't fix it by adjusting a token scope: the public_repo scope still lets you read stars for repos you own or collaborate on, but no scope grants access to anyone else's.

Why GitHub did it

The stargazers and watchers lists expose user identities, which have increasingly been scraped to harvest accounts for spam. Restricting these endpoints is GitHub's way of curbing that misuse.

What we're doing

We're actively exploring alternatives to keep charts working, and we'll share updates as we go.

Thank you for being a Star History user.