How to find the created date of a repository project on GitHub?

Question

How can I find the created date of a project on GitHub?

Basically, I have to find the first commit to see the created date, however, some projects have 500 commits, which wastes a lot of time trying to get to the first commit page.

Is there a quicker way to get the created date?

Answer 1

How can I find the created date of a project on GitHub?

Use the Repos GitHub API to retrieve this information

• Syntax: https://api.github.com/repos/{:owner}/{:repository}
• Example: https://api.github.com/repos/libgit2/libgit2sharp

The JSON payload will expose a created_at member with the UTC date the repository was created.

Considering the LibGit2Sharp repository above, one can see that it's been created on Feb, 2nd 2011 at 16:44:49 UTC.

Note: The created_at won't necessarily reflect the date of the first commit. It's the date the repository has been created on GitHub. For instance, the xunit/resharper-xunit project was recently moved from codeplex to GitHub. The created_at date is 2014-05-01T11:17:56Z, but the most of the commits date back much more farther than that.

Answer 2

If you are not interested in the exact creation date, and just would like to know how old a repo roughly is. You can go to Insights, then Contributors. For example, first commit for react was pushed on May 26 2013.