Pricing

Rating

Developer

Actor stats

Categories

Share

GitLab Star Gazer - Scrape GitLab Starrers and Extract Contact Info

GitLab Star Gazer is an Apify Actor that collects every user who starred a GitLab repository and enriches their profile with contact information: email addresses, phone numbers, and social media profiles scraped from their personal websites.

Use it for developer lead generation, open-source community outreach, sales prospecting, and competitive intelligence on GitLab repositories.

💡 Before you run this scraper

👁 Image

Some datasets like this one are already available ready-to-use on bananalitycs.com — download instantly or request custom delivery.

👁 Image
  👁 Image

What It Does

1. Fetches all starrers of any public GitLab repository with full pagination support
2. Enriches each profile via the GitLab API - name, bio, location, organization, follower count, LinkedIn, Twitter
3. Scrapes the personal website listed on the GitLab profile to extract:
   • Email address (mailto links + regex fallback)
   • Phone number (tel links + regex fallback)
   • LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, TikTok profile URLs

The result is a ready-to-use contact list of developers who expressed interest in a specific technology or project.

Key Features

Use Cases

• Sales prospecting: Build a contact list of developers who starred a competitor repo and reach out directly
• Developer outreach: Contact contributors or early adopters of an open-source project
• Community growth: Find active GitLab users in your niche who have public contact info
• Market research: Analyze who is watching a repository - organization, location, follower count
• Talent sourcing: Identify developers interested in a specific technology stack

Input Parameters

Getting a GitLab Token

1. Go to gitlab.com/-/user_settings/personal_access_tokens
2. Click Add new token
3. Select the read_api scope (read-only access is sufficient)
4. Copy the token and paste it into the gitlab_token field

Without a token the actor uses unauthenticated requests, which are subject to GitLab's IP-based rate limits. For repositories with hundreds or thousands of stars, a GitLab token is strongly recommended.

Output Data

Each record in the dataset represents one starrer. Example output:

{
"repo_owner":"gitlab-org",
"repo_name":"gitlab",
"username":"johndoe",
"gitlab_id":1234567,
"name":"John Doe",
"company":"Acme Corp",
"location":"San Francisco, CA",
"bio":"Full-stack developer. Open source enthusiast.",
"followers":342,
"following":120,
"profile_url":"https://gitlab.com/johndoe",
"avatar_url":"https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/...",
"website":"https://johndoe.dev",
"email":"john@example.com",
"email_from_website":"contact@johndoe.dev",
"phone_from_website":"415-555-0123",
"linkedin":"https://www.linkedin.com/in/johndoe",
"twitter":"https://twitter.com/johndoe",
"instagram":"https://www.instagram.com/johndoe",
"youtube":null,
"reddit":null,
"facebook":null,
"tiktok":null,
"starred_since":"2024-03-15T10:22:00Z"
}

Output Fields Reference

How Website Scraping Works

When scrape_websites is enabled, the actor visits the URL in each user's GitLab website_url field and:

1. Parses the HTML with BeautifulSoup
2. Looks for mailto: anchor tags first, then falls back to regex scanning the full page text
3. Looks for tel: anchor tags first, then falls back to regex for phone numbers
4. Searches all anchor tags for known social media domain patterns (LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, TikTok)

Only the first match per field is returned. The scraping step is skipped if the user has no personal website listed. LinkedIn and Twitter found directly in the GitLab profile take priority over values scraped from the website.

Rate Limits and Performance

With enrich_profiles enabled, each starrer costs 1 API call. A repo with 1,000 stars requires approximately 1,010 requests total (10 paginated starrer pages + 1,000 profile lookups). A GitLab token is recommended for repos with many stars.

The actor automatically waits when a rate limit is hit (HTTP 429) and resumes when the reset window opens (up to 10 minutes). If the wait would exceed 10 minutes, the actor stops early and logs a warning with instructions to add a GitLab token.

Tips

• Test with max_results set to 10 before running a full collection
• Set enrich_profiles: false and scrape_websites: false for a lightweight list of usernames only
• Export to CSV directly from the Apify Console for use in CRMs or email outreach tools
• Schedule the actor to run on a recurring basis to capture new starrers as they appear
• GitLab exposes LinkedIn and Twitter directly in user profiles — no website scraping needed for those fields