How to find the created date of a repository project on GitHub?

Question 1

How can I find the created date of a project on GitHub?

Use the Repos GitHub API to retrieve this information

Syntax: https://api.github.com/repos/{:owner}/{:repository}
Example: https://api.github.com/repos/libgit2/libgit2sharp

The JSON payload will expose a created_at member with the UTC date the repository was created.

Considering the LibGit2Sharp repository above, one can see that it's been created on Feb, 2nd 2011 at 16:44:49 UTC.

Note: The created_at won't necessarily reflect the date of the first commit. It's the date the repository has been created on GitHub. For instance, the xunit/resharper-xunit project was recently moved from codeplex to GitHub. The created_at date is 2014-05-01T11:17:56Z, but the most of the commits date back much more farther than that.

Question 2

If you are not interested in the exact creation date, and just would like to know how old a repo roughly is. You can go to Insights, then Contributors. For example, first commit for react was pushed on May 26 2013.

Question 3

@nulltoken's answer is very useful. To make it even more convenient, I decided to create a chrome extension for displaying a date of creation of a repository.

Highlights

Beautiful calendar icon in the summary bar on a repository page
Customizable date format followed Moment format pattern
Best performance by storing all fetched URIs in the Storage

Date of creation of a repository is displaying on the summary bar:

Date format is customizable by clicking at the extension icon:

This's working really well for me. I hope it's useful for you as well.

Question 4

I've written a bookmarklet for this, It may come in handy. You can even know the details of private or private - organization repositories with a simple workaround.

GitHub repository size, creation date bookmarklet | Source Code

Question 5

Syntax:

curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/{:owner}/{:repository} | jq '.created_at'

Example:

curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/NabiKAZ/video2gif | jq '.created_at'

Result:

"2017-04-22T22:58:47Z"

Question 6

You can also use Github's new GraphQL API:

query { 
  repository(owner: "graphql", name: "graphql-js") {
    name
    createdAt
  }
}

Question 7

Here's the answer without external plugins:

Click on your Profile (top right) and select Settings
In your Settings page, Click the Security log option in the Sidebar.
You should able to see all your repositories on the right
Hover on the date displayed to show the full date and time in a tooltip.

Question 8

I created a user script that shows the creation date directly on the GitHub page of the repo: https://openuserjs.org/scripts/cosenal/GitHub_Repo_Dates

Question 9

I've written a bash function for this.

# get github repo created time
ghage(){
  gh_url=${1:?usage: ghage https://github.com/owner/repo}
  owner_and_repo="$(echo "${gh_url}" | cut -d "/" -f4-5)"
  created_time=$(curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/${owner_and_repo}" | jq -r '.created_at')
  echo "${created_time}"
}

Example:

$ ▶ ghage https://github.com/torvalds/linux
2011-09-04T22:48:12Z

Credit to nulltoken for the API info.

Question 10

In case you want a C# version, you can run a unit test I wrote:

https://github.com/nilnul/nilnul.fs.git.TEST/blob/nilnul-pub/svr_/github/client/repo/vw/UnitTest1.cs

As the comment therein goes, you need to set your token in Windows Credential Manager, and also you need to create a dir named your username in the designated place. (For a pub repo, we shall not push your personal info.)

Question 11

Just look for the most likely files that would be created when the repo is initially setup such as gitignore or README.md. Then check their history. Normally these files will not have a lot of commits and you can easily check the commit history on those to find the oldest commit.