The State of the Octoverse 2018

It’s that time again, where we take a moment to reflect and ask ourselves: What can 31 million developers do in 365 days? Today we published our annual Octoverse report, showing just how much our community has accomplished on GitHub this year. And you might notice a theme from Octoverse 2018: more collaboration across 1.1 billion contributions and more projects than ever before.

Dive into the full report—or read on for the highlights.

31M+ developers

There are over 31 million developers building on GitHub, most of whom (80%) come from outside of the United States. In fact, the GitHub community comes from nearly every country and territory in the world—and we’re still growing.

More than 8 million new developers joined in the last year. In fact, we’ve seen more new accounts in 2018 so far than in the first six years of GitHub combined. And you aren’t showing any signs of slowing down: there are 1.6 times more unique contributors in 2018 than there were in 2017.

2.1M+ organizations

Over 2.1 million organizations are using GitHub across public and private repositories, up more than 40% from 2017. And the number of organization accounts on GitHub grew even faster this year than last year—in particular, across the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

96M+ repositories

More than 96 million repositories are hosted on GitHub as of September 30, 2018. That’s over 40% more than last year, and one third of all repositories were created in the last 12 months alone. Exciting new projects open sourced this year include felixrieseberg/windows95, wangshub/wechat_jump_game, and frappe/charts.

200M+ pull requests

We launched pull requests 2.0 in 2010. Since then, the GitHub community has opened over 200 million of them, more than one third of these in the last 12 months alone. The 200 millionth pull request was opened (and merged) in Vuetify—a semantic component framework for Vue.

5M+ vulnerability alerts

Since we launched security alerts in November 2017, we’ve alerted you to more than five million vulnerabilities across the open source projects your teams depend on. And you’ve already resolved more than 800,000 of these.

2x app installs across our ecosystem

The number of users who have ever installed an app on GitHub has doubled in the last 12 months. More exciting, organization members are over twice as active in making substantive contributions if they use apps on GitHub.

And more

These highlights show just how much the GitHub community is growing, but our data tells millions of stories. Here are some of our favorites:

• Ruby contributors use the ❤ reaction on issue and pull request comments more than contributors to any other programming language—no surprises here.
• Open source contributors from the Czech Republic are the “chattiest” in the world.
• Developers from all over the world take holidays off, but the quietest time on GitHub happens around New Year’s Day (January 1).
• The open source community makes time to contribute. Contributors are working in OS repositories well into the evening.

Are you excited about data as we are? Join GitHub Data Scientist Anna Filippova for a GitHub Universe session dedicated to this report. The livestream starts today, October 16, at 1:55 pm PT.

Tune in

Written by

Thomas Elliott

@telliott27