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🦊 GitLab Public Projects Scraper

🚀 Pull public GitLab projects with stars, forks, topics, and owners in seconds. Built on the official GitLab REST API.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-27 · 📊 25 fields per record · All public gitlab.com projects · Search, sort, and topic filters

The GitLab Public Projects Scraper queries the official gitlab.com/api/v4/projects endpoint and returns one normalized record per public project. Useful for tracking open-source DevOps tooling, discovering self-hosted alternatives to GitHub repos, monitoring topic communities (kubernetes, gitops, AI), or building competitive intelligence on the open-source ecosystem.

Coverage: every public project on gitlab.com. Filters by search query, topic, and sort order (stars, last activity, created date). Up to 1,000,000 records per run on the paid plan.

📋 What the GitLab Public Projects Scraper does

• Queries the public GitLab REST API directly
• Returns 25 normalized fields per project (name, path, stars, forks, topics, license, owner...)
• Supports search, sort, topic, and ascending/descending order
• Outputs to multiple table outputs via Apify dataset
• Auto-limits to 10 items on the free plan; up to 1,000,000 on paid

💡 Why it matters: GitLab hosts millions of projects but no public search UI exposes them at scale. This Actor turns that catalog into a queryable dataset.

🎬 Full Demo (🚧 Coming soon)

⚙️ Input

{"search":"react","maxItems":100,"orderBy":"star_count","sort":"desc"}

{"topic":"kubernetes","orderBy":"last_activity_at","maxItems":200}

⚠️ Good to Know: Without a token, GitLab's API rate-limits to ~10 requests per second per IP. The Actor paces requests automatically.

📊 Output

✨ Why choose this Actor

• Direct GitLab REST API, no third-party caching
• Real-time data, never stale
• Pay-per-result pricing; only charged for what you keep
• Works with Make, Zapier, n8n, Airbyte, GitHub Actions, Google Sheets

📈 How it compares to alternatives

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account w/ $5 credit
2. Open the GitLab Public Projects Scraper actor page
3. Set search, orderBy, optional topic, and maxItems
4. Click Start and wait for the run to finish
5. Use the dataset as multiple table outputs

💼 Business use cases

Developer relations

Security

Recruiting

Research

🔌 Automating GitLab Public Projects Scraper

Run on a schedule, forward results to Make, Zapier, n8n, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub Actions, or Google Drive. Push new high-star projects into a Slack channel daily.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

Research

Build a longitudinal study of OSS topic growth over months/years.

Personal

Discover obscure self-hosted alternatives to your favourite SaaS tools.

Non-profit

Track open civic-tech projects by topic (e.g. civic-tech, accessibility).

Experimentation

Build a "GitLab radar" Slack bot for newly active projects in your space.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

• ChatGPT
• Claude
• Perplexity
• Microsoft Copilot

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Does it need a GitLab token? No. Public endpoints work anonymously.

Q: Can I scrape private projects? No - only visibility: public is returned.

Q: How fresh is the data? Live - every request hits gitlab.com.

Q: Can I filter by language? Use the topic field - many projects tag languages (e.g. python, rust).

Q: What's the rate limit? ~10 RPS anonymous; the Actor paces well under it.

Q: Can I scrape self-hosted GitLab? This Actor targets gitlab.com specifically. Self-hosted instances would need a forked Actor.

Q: Does it include archived projects? Yes - check archived field if needed.

Q: How do I find a topic slug? Browse gitlab.com/explore/projects/topics.

Q: Can I sort by forks? orderBy supports id, name, path, created_at, updated_at, last_activity_at, star_count. Forks not supported by upstream API.

Q: Does it return README contents? No - just readmeUrl. Fetch separately if needed.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Slack, Discord, Sheets, Airtable, BigQuery, S3, Snowflake, and 100+ more via Apify webhooks.

🔗 Recommended Actors

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection.

🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form

⚠️ Disclaimer: independent tool, not affiliated with GitLab Inc. Only publicly available data is collected.