The state of the Octoverse 2016

It’s been an amazing year for building software. Join us for a trip through the GitHub Octoverse and explore some of the highlights from the last twelve months.

Open source

From the code that sent Apollo 11 to the moon, to an open source curriculum that helps nonprofits—you shared and built lots of amazing things over the past year. Here are the most starred open source repositories on GitHub, showing which repos users starred in common.

In total, GitHub is home to open source projects written in 316 unique programming languages. Here are the most popular by number of pull requests in the last twelve months.

15 most popular languages used on GitHub by opened Pull Request and percentage change from previous period

JavaScript 97%

1,604,219

Java 63%

763,783

Python 54%

744,045

Ruby 66%

740,610

PHP 43%

478,153

C++ 43%

330,259

CSS 36%

271,782

C# 88%

229,985

C 47%

202,295

Go 93%

188,121

Shell 76%

143,071

Objective C 37%

75,478

Scala 54%

70,216

Swift 262%

62,284

TypeScript 250%

55,587

Standouts include JavaScript, C#, and Go who have seen almost doubled growth. Swift and TypeScript are up and coming with 3.5x growth.

There was a lot of public activity on GitHub over the last 12 months. To give you the full picture, here are the totals and stories of active users, repositories, organizations, and active issues in public projects on GitHub. Active means there was some activity within the last year, e.g. code commited, a comment created, a repository starred, or an issue opened. The queries and data that power these open source metrics are available to everyone, thanks to our partnership with Google BigQuery.

Totals in public repositories from the last twelve months

5.8M+ active users

Like @acabunoc, Lead Developer for Open Source Engagement at the Mozilla Foundation who is developing new ways to engage contributors on open source projects.

331k+ active organizations

Like the Dat project who are working openly to develop a peer to peer tool for distributing datasets in science, journalism and government.

19.4M+ active repositories

Like the Federal Source Code Policy on GitHub released by The White House, who this year solicited community feedback on GitHub.

10.7M+ active issues

Like this one opened in the Go programming language repo that used open source data on Google’s BiqQuery to help decide whether to add new functionality to a Go standard library.

Here are some of the most active Organizations and well-loved projects by the number of unique contributors (users who pushed code, opened or commented on an issue or PR), unique code reviewers (users who commented on the changed files), and most forks.

Repositories with the most open source contributors

  1. FortAwesome/Font-Awesome 10,654
  2. docker/docker8,253
  3. npm/npm7,041
  4. jlord/patchwork6,806
  5. facebook/react-native 6,250
  6. Microsoft/vscode 5,855
  7. atom/atom 5,745
  8. FreeCodeCamp/FreeCodeCamp 5,622
  9. angular/material 4,355
  10. angular/angular 4,217

Organizations with the most open source contributors

  1. Microsoft 16,419
  2. facebook15,682
  3. docker14,059
  4. angular12,841
  5. google12,140
  6. atom 9,698
  7. FortAwesome 9,617
  8. elastic 7,220
  9. Apache 6,999
  10. npm 6,815

Earlier this year we released Reactions and it seems like you’ve given them an overwhelming 👍—1.26M to be exact.

Emoji reactions count in public repositories from the last twelve months

:+1:

:hooray:

:heart:

:laugh:

:-1:

:confused:

This one made us chuckle—here is the issue with most laugh reactions: chrislgarry/Apollo-11#3

Community

Over the past year, GitHub partnered with, held, and sponsored events all over the world. At Patchworks we watched new developers learn how to use Git. Our ConnectHome partnership provided low-cost internet access for families living in HUD-assisted housing. Sponsoring events like Rails Girls and hosting our own conferences allowed us to meet more GitHub users than ever before.

44 Patchwork events held
23 ConnectHome events held
208 Event sponsorships
4 GitHub hosted conferences

We loved meeting you. We invite you to follow along and join us for a future event.

Newcomers

This year GitHub grew by more than 5.2 million users and 303K organizations. We have more new students, developers, and businesses using GitHub than ever before.

815K+ made their first pull request

Like this pull request opened by @dawnpaladin. After being connected with Pybee’s Batavia project through the amazing Twitter account @yourfirstpr, @dawnpaladin found some failing tests in the project. Project maintainer @freakboy3742 took the time to discuss the problem and walk him through submitting his first PR, and the issue was solved.

2.8M+ created their first repo

Like this Comic Book Search Engine repo created by @katana171. She was one of our Patchwork Toronto attendees, and even though she was new to GitHub, she jumped in with both feet, and wasted no time building a useful and fun project that anyone can contribute to.

165K+ student developer packs

Like current student @NickTikhonov, a GitHub Campus Expert and summer intern from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, who created the Sourcerer Atom plugin as a tool to teach his classmates about JavaScript and web APIs.

Countries with the biggest increase in new user signups

Flag of China China +97% increase from last year
Flag of Indonesia Indonesia +90% increase from last year
Flag of India India +76% increase from last year
Flag of the Russia Russia +74% increase from last year
Flag of Brazil Brazil +64% increase from last year
Flag of Japan Japan +52% increase from last year

Organizations

With almost 80M total Pull Requests on GitHub, we know that 85% of all requests for change come from within organizations.

Pull Requests over time since 2010

  • in repositories owned by an organization
  • in repositories owned by a user

PRs released 2010

7.7M 2013

1.5M 2013

11.3M 2016

66.3M 2016

Alongside businesses using Organizations, the largest companies on planet Earth are adopting the GitHub workflow using GitHub Enterprise.

44% of FORTUNE 50 companies used GitHub Enterprise in 2016
50% of FORTUNE 10 companies used GitHub Enterprise in 2016

It’s not just technology companies either—from retailers to healthcare and financial services companies—GitHub Enterprise provides the security and easy management these types of businesses require with the same GitHub experience developers love.

Distribution of industries among GitHub Enterprise customers

Software & Internet

26%

Business Services

15%

Education

8%

Manufacturing

8%

Healthcare

6%

Media & Entertainment

6%

Retail

6%

Telecom

6%

Consumer Services

5%

From chat applications to continuous integration services and project management tools, teams are integrating their favorite development tools with GitHub. Here are the top GitHub integrations that helped you and your team work better this past year.

Relative sizes of the most installed integrations among Organizations

Thank you for making the last year one to remember.

We’re excited to share the many ways you expand the GitHub Universe next year.