GitHub stars: how to find, organize, and export your starred repos

Your GitHub stars live at github.com/stars, or click your profile picture and choose Your stars. From there you can sort, filter by language, and group repos into Lists, but the search box only matches repository names, which is why the one you need is so hard to find again.

Starring is the easiest bookmark on the internet: one click, no decision. That's the problem. A few hundred stars later, your Stars page is a long list of repo names you half-recognize. Here's how the page actually works, how to organize and export your stars, and how to make them searchable by what each repo does.

Where to find your GitHub stars

• Your stars page: click your profile picture (top right), then Your stars, or go straight to github.com/stars.
• Star a repo: click Star at the top right of any repository page. To undo it, click Starred.
• Star a topic: topics (like rust or machine-learning) can be starred too, and they show up on the same page as your repos.

Your stars page is the only place GitHub collects them. There's no folder view and no inbox, just that one list.

Why you can't find the repo you starred

GitHub gives you three tools on the Stars page, and none of them is search in the way you need:

• Search matches the name of a repository or topic. It doesn't look at the description, the README, or what the project does.
• Sort by has three options: Recently starred, Recently active, and Most stars.
• Filters narrow by Language and Type.

That works when you remember the name. You usually don't. You remember "that Rust CLI for diffing JSON" or "the React table library with virtualization," and neither of those is a repo name. Filtering to Rust and scrolling helps until you've starred 80 Rust projects.

How to organize GitHub stars with Lists

Lists are GitHub's answer to folders. They're still labeled a public preview, so details may change, but they work today:

1. Create a list. On your stars page, click Create list next to "Lists," give it a name and description, and click Create.
2. Add a repo. On the stars page, open the Starred dropdown next to the repo and pick a list. You can do the same from the Star or Starred dropdown on the repository page itself.

Two things to know before you build a system on Lists:

• Lists are public. They appear on your stars page for anyone to see. If you add a private repository, it only shows up for people who already have access to that repo.
• Filing is manual. Every repo has to be placed by hand, and the hundreds of stars you already have don't sort themselves. It's easy to make three lists, file twenty repos, and stop.

If you like folders, our guide to organizing your bookmarks has a naming system that keeps lists from sprawling, and it applies here too.

How to export your GitHub stars

There's no export button on the Stars page. The data is all available through GitHub's API, though, and the GitHub CLI makes it a one-liner.

With the GitHub CLI (after gh auth login), this writes every starred repo to a tab-separated file you can open in a spreadsheet:

gh api user/starred --paginate \
  --jq '.[] | [.full_name, .html_url, .description] | @tsv' > stars.tsv

To include when you starred each repo, ask for GitHub's star media type, which adds a starred_at timestamp and nests the repo under repo:

gh api user/starred --paginate \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.star+json" \
  --jq '.[] | [.starred_at, .repo.full_name, .repo.html_url] | @tsv' > stars.tsv

Without the CLI, you can see anyone's public stars as JSON in a browser at https://api.github.com/users/USERNAME/starred?per_page=100, adding &page=2, &page=3, and so on. Each page holds at most 100 repos, and unauthenticated requests are tightly rate-limited, so the CLI is the better route for a big list.

Make your stars searchable by what they do

The fix for "I starred it but can't find it" isn't more folders. It's search that reads what each repo is about, not just its name.

That's what Stashr does with GitHub. With the extension installed, every time you click Star, it saves the repo into your library: the name and owner, description, the opening of the README, topics, language, and license. Each one is AI-tagged on the way in, so you can search in plain English and get the repo back by what it does.

• Your existing stars come too. A one-time import from the extension walks your whole Stars list, private repos included.
• No token. Stashr reads GitHub through your logged-in browser session and never asks for API access.
• It stays in sync. Unstar a repo on GitHub and it leaves your library too.
• One library. Your stars sit next to what you save from X, Reddit, and any web page, under one search.

GitHub stars, option by option

Common questions

How do I see all my starred repositories on GitHub?

Click your profile picture and choose Your stars, or go to github.com/stars. Set Sort by to Recently starred to see the newest first, or filter by Language to narrow it down.

How do I export my GitHub stars to CSV?

GitHub has no built-in export. Run gh api user/starred --paginate with a --jq filter (see the commands above) to write a tab-separated file that Excel and Google Sheets open directly.

Can I see when I starred a repository?

The stars page can sort by Recently starred, but for exact dates use the API with the application/vnd.github.star+json media type, which returns a starred_at timestamp for every repo.

Are GitHub star Lists private?

No. Lists appear publicly on your stars page. Private repositories you add to a list are only visible to people who already have access to them.

How do I unstar a repository?

Open the repository and click Starred at the top right, or use the Starred button next to the repo on your stars page.

What happens to my stars when a repo is renamed or deleted?

A renamed repo keeps your star, and GitHub redirects the old URL to the new one. A deleted repo is gone from your stars, along with any trace of what it was, unless you saved a copy of its description somewhere else.