How do you see who starred your GitHub repo?

Yes, and it is the first thing to know. On June 30, 2026 GitHub restricted who can see a repository’s stargazer list. Access to that list, both the /stargazers web page and the REST API endpoint behind it, is now limited to the repository’s admins and collaborators. The reason GitHub gave was that the public list was being harvested to collect user data for spam.

The change is narrower than it first sounds. The star count itself, the number next to the Star button, is still public on every repo. What is gated is the list of exactly which accounts starred. And owners did not lose access to their own repos: if it is your project, you can still see everyone who starred it.

So the honest 2026 answer to “who starred my repo” splits in two. Your own repo still works. Everyone else’s no longer does the old way. This guide covers both, starting with yours.

The web page. Sign in as the repo’s owner or a collaborator, open the repo, and click the number next to the Star button (the count, not the star icon, which would star or unstar it). Or go straight to the pattern github.com/OWNER/REPO/stargazers, so a repo at github.com/acme/rocketdb keeps its stargazers at github.com/acme/rocketdb/stargazers. Because you are an admin, GitHub serves you the full list.

The API. The REST route GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/stargazers still works when you call it with your own token on a repo you own. Send the application/vnd.github.star+json media type in the Accept header and each entry gains a starred_at timestamp, which the web page never shows. The gh CLI signs the request with your account automatically:

gh api "repos/acme/rocketdb/stargazers?per_page=100" \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.star+json"

The one wrinkle: this works only because you are the admin. An automated integration or a third-party app token does not inherit that standing, even on a repo it was installed on, so seeing your own stargazers programmatically means acting with your own account’s access. A token gives you 5,000 requests an hour, enough to page through most repos.

Not through the old routes. Since the June 2026 change, opening a stranger’s /stargazers page while logged out, or calling the REST endpoint for a repo you do not admin, returns an error instead of the list. This is the part that broke the tools people used to browse any project’s stargazers, and it was deliberate.

That line is worth taking at face value. GitHub restricted the public routes precisely so that a repo’s stargazers are the maintainer’s to see, not anyone’s to harvest. The change is also one GitHub has shown it is willing to tighten further, so building on any way around it means building on sand.

The takeaway: the frictionless “peek at any repo’s stargazers” era is over. The durable, and frankly more defensible, use of stargazer data is understanding the people engaging with your own project, which is where a scan earns its keep.

Whichever route you use, the list itself is thin. It shows each stargazer’s avatar and username, newest first. That ordering is the one genuinely useful built-in feature: the top of the list is whoever starred most recently, so a glance after a launch or a Hacker News spike tells you who just arrived.

No dates on the page. GitHub records when each star happened, but the web page never displays it. Only the API’s starred_at field surfaces it.

No emails, company, or role. The list is usernames. To learn anything about a person you click into their profile, one at a time.

No sorting, searching, filtering, or export. Newest-first is the only order, and there is no download button. Browsing a 5,000-star repo is clicking Next through more than a hundred pages.

So the list answers “which usernames starred” and nothing more. For the question people usually mean, who are these people and which ones are worth reaching, you need to turn usernames into profiles.

Manually, you click each username and read the profile: name, company, location, bio, links, and a public email if the person published one. That works for twenty people. At two thousand it is a week of clicking, and you still end up copying rows into a spreadsheet by hand.

This is the part WarmStars automates for your own repo. One scan turns your stargazer list into named profiles: name, company, role, location, social links, and a public email where one exists. Every email carries a confidence tier (verified, high, medium, or likely) so you know how much to trust each row before you use it. You can filter by company or role, sort by how recently each person starred, and export to CSV.

It stays on the right side of the line GitHub just drew: public data only, a do-not-contact list that is honored on every scan and export, and no sending. WarmStars hands you the list; the outreach stays in your tools and under your name. If that is where you are headed, the follow-up guides on finding a stargazer’s email and turning stars into customers pick up from here, and there is a dedicated page on how open source maintainers use the same list to understand their community.

The free plan covers two scans a month with no credit card, enough to see your own repo’s list enriched end to end. Paid plans start at $39 per month if you outgrow it; the full breakdown is on the pricing page.