Knowledge · Open-Source Code

Total GitHub Repositories

From a private beta in 2008 to over 630 million repositories: the shared codebase of civilisation.

• Doubling time: 8mo → 3.25yr now
• 121M new in 2025 topped all of 2018 (100M)
• ~80% of new developers used Copilot in week one
• Only ~63% of repos are public

GitHub opened to the public in April 2008, after a private beta, and closed that first year with over 50,000 public repositories. By 2025 the platform hosted over 630 million total, public and private combined, a roughly 12,600-fold expansion in 17 years. More repositories were created in 2025 alone (121 million) than existed on the entire platform in 2018 (100 million). That is a fact about volume, though, not about pace, and the pace is easing rather than accelerating: the doubling time has stretched from about eight months in the early years to about three and a quarter years now, which is what compounding looks like once the base gets large. Octoverse 2025 reports that nearly 80% of new developers on GitHub use GitHub Copilot within their first week.

The metric here is total repos; about 63% are public per Octoverse 2025. Early points are GitHub’s own announced milestones, plotted at their announcement dates rather than year-ends; the 2010 and 2011 figures count Gists alongside repositories, as GitHub reported them, and the January 2016 point is the count GitHub published on its own about page. The two most recent points are Octoverse figures, and the Octoverse year is not the calendar year and has not stayed put: the 2024 report covers 1 October 2023 to 30 September 2024, the 2025 report covers 1 September 2024 to 31 August 2025, so each sits at the close of its own window. Whichever window you count in, the code forks faster than anyone can catalogue it.

Source: GitHub Octoverse + GitHub blog milestones

Download the data: github_repos.csv · github_repos.json

All curves · The chart is drawn in your browser and needs JavaScript. Every number it plots is in the table above.