I am continually blown away by the staggering amount of work happening on GitHub. Every day, our users commit code, open and close issues, and make plans for their software to take over the world. We track all of this activity and make the public data available via our API.

Over half a million individual events happen every day on GitHub. Here’s a look into the ever-expanding Octoverse in 2012.

Push It

2012 GitHub Activity

Since the beginning of the year, we’ve seen a doubling in activity, with pushes alone responsible for over 60% of the events in a given day. On a typical weekday, 10k people sign up for a GitHub account, and our users:

  • push 140GB of new data
  • create 25k repositories and 7k pull requests
  • push to 125k repositories

Best of all:

  • 10k people create their very first repository

We’re Growing. Fast.

Looking over the past few years, the amount of people using GitHub is growing at an incredible rate; there are now 2.8MM GitHub users, which represents 133% growth in 2012 alone. Even more impressive is how much those users are doing on GitHub. In that same time period, the overall number of repositories increased 171% to 4.6MM.

Year-over-year user and repository growth

Since software is changing the world, it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s developed by people from all corners of the globe. While the United States is the most active country on GitHub.com, it accounts for only 28% of our traffic.

The top 10 countries visiting GitHub.com are: United States, Germany, United Kingdom, China, Japan, France, India, Canada, Russia and Brazil. The top 10 cities are: London, San Francisco, New York, Paris, Moscow, Beijing, Berlin, Bangalore, Sydney and Toronto.

Notable OSS in 2012

Stars are a way to keep track of repositories that you find interesting. These projects, all created this year, attracted the most stargazers:

  1. FortAwesome/FontAwesome: The iconic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap
  2. textmate/textmate: TextMate is a graphical text editor for OS X 10.7+
  3. meteor/meteor: Meteor, an ultra-simple, database-everywhere, data-on-the-wire, pure-Javascript web framework
  4. saasbook/hw3_rottenpotatoes: A project used in a free Software as a Service course taught through BerkeleyX
  5. ivaynberg/select2: Select2 is a jQuery based replacement for select boxes
  6. jkbr/httpie: HTTPie is a CLI, cURL-like tool for humans
  7. maker/ratchet: Prototype iPhone apps with simple HTML, CSS, and JS components
  8. twitter/bower: A package manager for the web
  9. Kicksend/mailcheck: Email domain spelling suggester
  10. jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II: A running-jumping-swordfighting game for the Apple II from 1985-89

It’s better to work together than to work alone. By developing software on GitHub, you’re making it easy for 2.8MM people to help you out. In the past year, these projects attracted the highest numbers of unique contributors:

  1. mxcl/homebrew: The missing package manager for OS X
  2. rails/rails: Ruby on Rails
  3. CyanogenMod/android_frameworks_base: Android base frameworks
  4. CocoaPods/Specs: CocoaPods (cocoapods.org) specifications
  5. symfony/symfony: The Symfony PHP framework
  6. zendframework/zf2: Zend Framework
  7. openstack/nova: OpenStack Compute (Nova)
  8. saltstack/salt: Central system and configuration manager for infrastructure
  9. TrinityCore/TrinityCore: TrinityCore Open Source MMO Framework
  10. github/hubot-scripts: optional scripts for hubot, a customizable, kegerator-powered life embetterment robot

❤️ 💥 🐫

Across commit messages, issues, pull requests, and comments, emoji is a vital part of GitHub’s daily workflow. Life, and our products, just wouldn’t be the same without it. When we looked at the popular emoji used on weekdays (green) versus those same emoji on weekends (blue), we saw the 🔥 🔥 🔥 is spreading.

During the week, the business of 🚢ing gets done, with :shipit:, ✨, 👎, and 👍 taking the lead:

Weekday and weekend emoji

The most popular emoji on the weekend paint a different picture; time for a 🍹 under a 🌴.

Weekend emoji

Thank you!

We believe GitHub is the best place to build software, but it wouldn’t be the same without you. Thank you for building, sharing and shipping. Thank you for proving that it’s better to work together than to work alone.

From the GitHub family to you, thanks. Next year is going to be even more amazing.