ncdc/github-release-stats

github-release-stats is a command-line tool that pulls release history data from GitHub repositories and tells you how frequently they ship major releases. Specifically, it looks at "x.y.0" releases, meaning significant version milestones like 1.0.0, 2.3.0, or 5.1.0, rather than every minor patch or bugfix. It then calculates the number of those releases, the minimum, average, and maximum number of days between them, and the standard deviation to show how consistent the release cadence is. To use it, you need a GitHub personal access token, which you can generate from your GitHub account. You set that token as an environment variable on your computer, then run the tool and point it at one or more repositories. You can specify repositories individually, or provide a default organization and list multiple repos at once. The tool queries GitHub's API and prints a table showing each repo's release statistics side by side. This tool is useful for engineering managers, open-source maintainers, or anyone evaluating the health and rhythm of a software project. For example, if you're comparing two libraries and want to understand which one ships more reliably, the stats can reveal whether a project releases major versions every few weeks or every few years, and whether that cadence is consistent or erratic. It's also handy for benchmarking your own team's release frequency against well-known projects like Kubernetes or GitHub's own Actions repos. The project is written in Go and is intentionally narrow in scope. It doesn't track every release a project has ever published, it focuses specifically on x.y.0 versions, which typically represent meaningful milestones rather than routine patches. This makes the output easier to interpret but means it won't give you a complete picture of day-to-day development activity. The README doesn't go into detail about installation beyond the usage examples, so you'll likely need to build the Go binary yourself.