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Is there a easy way on GitHub.com to find a repositories creation date? I'm comparing a number of projects and would rather not check each of them out if possible.

Oliver Sieweke
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jcalfee314
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  • What do you define as a repository's "creation date"? The authored date of the first commit in the repository? When the repository was first pushed to GitHub? –  Apr 21 '14 at 04:38
  • Also, what, to you, is considered "easy"? –  Apr 21 '14 at 04:47
  • Does this answer your question? [How to find the created date of a repository project on GitHub?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23611669/how-to-find-the-created-date-of-a-repository-project-on-github) – TylerH Oct 08 '21 at 13:07
  • The fact that Github makes this information obscure enough to warrant several SO questions and answers is IMO pretty ridiculous. – cbmanica Aug 24 '22 at 17:36

1 Answers1

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If, by "creation date", you mean when a repo was first created on GitHub by either using New Repo or forking a repo, then you can get that information through the GitHub API:

curl https://api.github.com/repos/<owner>/<repo> | grep created_at

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  4944  100  4944    0     0   8337      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  8337

  "created_at": "2014-04-21T05:03:30Z",

The command above assumes that you have access to the curl and grep tools from the command-line. If you're using Windows, an equivalent to grep is findstr.

Notice the created_at date-time stamp. It's in UTC (that's what the Z means), and it says that the repo was created on GitHub on April 21st, 2014, at 05:03:30 UTC.

Also note that this is not the same as the author and committer dates of the initial commit. To get those, simply use git log for the repo in question:

git log --reverse --format=fuller
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    Curl and grep are basically platform independent so I think this is fair assumption for programmers at stackoverflow. Wow, great idea to check the API! Thanks for the example. – jcalfee314 Apr 21 '14 at 12:43
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    You can just access `https://api.github.com/repos//` from your browser and `Ctrl+F` "created_at". – mechanicious Jul 26 '17 at 08:14