What was the first project on GitHub?

Note: This is cross-posted from Quora where I wrote this answer initially.

The first project on GitHub was grit. How do I know this? Just some clever use of the search and API.

Here’s a GitHub search to see the first 10 projects that were created on GitHub. The search uses the created keyword, and searches for projects created before 15 Jan 2008.

They are (in order of creation) (numeric id of repo in brackets):

  1. mojombo/grit (1)

    Grit gives you object oriented read/write access to Git repositories via Ruby. Deprecated in favor of libgit2/rugged

  2. wycats/merb-core (26)

    Merb Core: All you need. None you don’t. Merb was an early ruby framework that was merged to Rails No longer maintained.

  3. rubinius/rubinius (27)

    Rubinius, the Ruby Environment Still under active development

  4. mojombo/god (28)

    God is an easy to configure, easy to extend monitoring framework written in Ruby. Still actively maintained, and use by GitHub internally as well, I think

  5. vanpelt/jsawesome(29)

    JSAwesome provides a powerful JSON based DSL for creating interactive forms. Its last update was in 2008

  6. wycats/jspec (31)

    A JavaScript BDD Testing Library No longer maintained

  7. defunkt/exception_logger (35)

    The Exception Logger logs your Rails exceptions in the database and provides a funky web interface to manage them. No longer maintained>

  8. defunkt/ambition (36)
  9. technoweenie/restful-authentication (42)

    Generates common user authentication code for Rails/Merb, with a full test/unit and rspec suite and optional Acts as State Machine support built-in.Maintained till Aug 2011

  10. technoweenie/attachment_fu (43)

    Treat an ActiveRecord model as a file attachment, storing its patch, size, content type, etc.

I’m sure the id from 2-25 would be taken up by many of the internal GitHub projects, such as github/github. To get the numeric id of a repo, visit https://api.github.com/repos/mojombo/grit and change the URL accordingly.

Published on August 02, 2014
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