GitHub Trending Daily Scanner

A small automation that uses Claude Code to find 3 hot GitHub repos each day and email you a curated digest. It deduplicates against repos already sent and personalizes ranking around your stated interests.

What it does

Each run:

1. Reads a history file of repos already sent to avoid duplicates.
2. Queries the GitHub Search API for high-momentum repos (recently pushed, recently created with star surges).
3. Cross-references with github.com/trending and a web search for the current month.
4. Picks 3 standouts not yet sent, weighted toward your INTERESTS config.
5. Writes a markdown report under data/reports/.
6. Appends the picks to data/sent_repos.md.
7. Emails the report via your own send-email script.

Requirements

• macOS or Linux
• Claude Code CLI installed and authenticated
• A script you control that sends email (any language) accepting the flags --to, --subject, --body-file

The repo intentionally does not ship an emailer — bring your own SMTP/Resend/SES wrapper to keep credentials out of the project.

Setup

git clone <your-fork-url> github-trending
cd github-trending
cp .env.example .env
# edit .env with your email + path to your send-email script
chmod +x scripts/run_daily.sh

Test it:

./scripts/run_daily.sh
tail -f logs/github-trending.log

Configuration

All config lives in .env (loaded by the script). See .env.example for the full list. The two required values:

Variable	Description
RECIPIENT_EMAIL	Where the daily digest is sent
SEND_EMAIL_SCRIPT	Absolute path to your email sender. Must accept --to, --subject, --body-file

Optional:

Variable	Default	Notes
INTERESTS	AI/ML, developer tools, frontend, automation	Comma-separated topics that bias ranking
MODEL	claude-sonnet-4-6	Any Claude Code-compatible model ID
DATA_DIR / REPORTS_DIR / SENT_REPOS_FILE / LOG_DIR	inside repo	Override if you want output elsewhere
MAX_ATTEMPTS	4	Retries before giving up (for unattended runs)
INITIAL_BACKOFF	60	Seconds between retries; doubles each time
HARD_TIMEOUT	1800	Seconds before a hung run is killed

Reliability

For unattended scheduled runs the script wraps the Claude call in a retry loop: up to MAX_ATTEMPTS tries with exponential backoff (INITIAL_BACKOFF, doubling each time), and each run is killed if it exceeds HARD_TIMEOUT. Every attempt and the final outcome are written to logs/github-trending.log.

Scheduling

macOS LaunchAgent (recommended)

Create ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.user.github-trending.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
  "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>com.user.github-trending</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/absolute/path/to/github-trending/scripts/run_daily.sh</string>
    </array>
    <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Hour</key><integer>9</integer>
        <key>Minute</key><integer>0</integer>
    </dict>
    <key>StandardOutPath</key>
    <string>/tmp/github-trending.out</string>
    <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
    <string>/tmp/github-trending.err</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Load it:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.user.github-trending.plist

Linux cron

0 9 * * * /absolute/path/to/github-trending/scripts/run_daily.sh

Output

• data/reports/report_YYYY-MM-DD.md — the daily digest, one file per run.
• data/sent_repos.md — append-only history used for dedup.
• logs/github-trending.log — run log.

These directories are gitignored — they hold your personal scan output.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.