code-archive
GH Archive
A running record of public activity on GitHub: the public event timeline has been archived hourly since 2011, amounting to billions of events. It is a bulk dataset rather than a search site, you download gzipped JSON files per hour or query the public BigQuery dataset; there is no per-record search API or web search form. Researchers reach for it to analyze or reconstruct historical GitHub activity offline.
No programmatic check, opens the archive’s own search.
Why it’s useful & how it works
GH Archive captures the public GitHub event stream and has archived it hourly since January 2011, making it the most complete longitudinal record of open-source activity on the platform. Researchers reach for it to answer questions about the history of GitHub itself: when did a repository first appear, how did contributor activity change over time, how did a particular event type evolve? The dataset is distributed as gzipped JSON files downloadable by hour and day, and is also available as a public dataset on Google BigQuery for SQL-style analysis. There is no per-record web search; Echo links you to the project page and the BigQuery dataset for further exploration.
What’s inside
Billions of public GitHub events spanning more than a decade, organised by hour. The full dataset runs to tens of terabytes and grows by roughly one file per hour around the clock.
API access
bulk gzip JSON https://data.gharchive.org/YYYY-MM-DD-H.json.gz ; BigQuery public dataset
What we measured
Our own probes, not the archive’s own claims. Re-run periodically; every reading below is dated.
Reachability
- Direct request
- Responded HTTP 200 563 ms
- Through a datacenter proxy
- Responded HTTP 200 629 ms
Reachability measured 2026-08-22.
Access
Freely reachable, no key, login, or captcha.