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: 7mo → 3.25yr now
• 121M new in 2025 topped all of 2018 (100M)
• Copilot/Cursor speed first commits
• Only ~63% of repos are public

GitHub opened to the public in April 2008, after a private beta, and closed that first year with about 33,000 repositories. By 2025 the platform hosted over 630 million total, public and private combined, a roughly 19,000-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 seven months in the early years to about three and a quarter years now, which is what compounding looks like once the base gets large. AI-assisted coding (Copilot, Cursor) has compressed time-to-first-commit for new developers, and AI-generated repos are a growing fraction of the total. 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 figure counts Gists alongside repositories, as GitHub reported it, 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.