If you’ve ever published a library on GitHub, you’ve probably noticed that GitHub shows a nice sidebar section on some repositories — “Used by X repositories” — giving your project social proof and discoverability.

Unfortunately, this info is only visible if 100+ repositories depend on your project.

That sucks because I maintain several open source libraries like jekyll-auto-authors that have dozens of real users and I’d love to showcase that information despite the thresholds.

So I built dependents.info — a simple tool that shows your network dependents right inside your README!

Live demo

This is how the generated image looks like:

Made with dependents.info.

Watch now

How it works

The idea is simple: dependents.info is a GitHub Action written in TypeScript + a Go based API that together generate a SVG image showing which repositories depend on your package.

Just like contrib.rocks, but for network dependents.

The tech stack:

• GitHub Action in TypeScript: Crawls your repository’s network dependents and sends them to the backend.
• API in Go (Fiber): Authenticates using GitHub OIDC to verify requests, stores data, and generates a minimal SVG image with avatars and names of top users.

Features

• Works for any public GitHub repository.
• Secure: uses GitHub’s built-in OIDC to verify authenticity.
• Shows top 10 dependent repos (sorted by stars).
• Live SVG badge, embeddable in any README.
• Supports a lot of configurations.
• Robust caching and rate-limit friendly.
• Minimal setup: just a few lines in a .yml GitHub workflow.

Setup

1. Add a GitHub Action to your repository:

Add this simple workflow file to your repository’s .github/workflows folder.

dependents.yml

name: Dependents Action

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  dependents:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      id-token: write
    steps:
      - uses: gouravkhunger/dependents.info@main

1. Copy the following code snippet below and replace owner/repo with your repository’s name. paste it wherever you want to embed the image.

<a href="https://github.com/owner/repo/network/dependents">
  <img src="https://dependents.info/owner/repo/image.svg" />
</a>

Made with [dependents.info](https://dependents.info).

As soon as you push these changes, you’ll see the image inserted automatically!

See It Live

• Website: dependents.info
• GitHub: gouravkhunger/dependents.info

Got ideas or feature requests? Drop them on the repo — contributions and feedback are super welcome.

Hope this project helps bring visibility to your packages, no matter how big or small!

Happy coding :)

— Gourav