OrbitOrg — GitHub Organization Explorer

Chart any public GitHub organization as an interactive orbit: every repository plotted as a point, sized by stars, colored by language, and positioned by how recently it was pushed to. An evolution of the original Orbit profile explorer, extended to work at the organization level.

Live demo →

Features

• Look up any public GitHub organization by name
• Interactive SVG orbit chart — click or tab to any repository for detail
• Position encodes recency of activity, size encodes stars, color encodes primary language
• Fully keyboard accessible (Tab + Enter/Space on any node)
• Respects prefers-reduced-motion — the orbit's ambient rotation is disabled for users who request it
• Handles the real edge cases of a public API: unknown organizations (404), rate limiting (403), and network failures, each with a clear message
• Zero dependencies — vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Why no backend?

The GitHub REST API serves public organization and repository data over plain HTTPS with CORS enabled, so the browser can call it directly — no server needed to proxy requests or hide a key, because none is required for this kind of read-only public data.

Rate limit: unauthenticated requests are capped at 60 per hour, per IP address. That's fine for personal/portfolio use, but if you hit the limit, GitHub returns a 403 and the app shows a friendly message rather than crashing.

Note on repo count: organizations with very large numbers of repos are capped at the first 100 (one page) for chart legibility.

Run it locally

Clone the repo and open index.html in a browser. No build step, no npm install.

git clone https://github.com/arjayb/OrbitOrg.git
cd OrbitOrg
open index.html # or just double-click it

If your browser blocks fetch on the file:// protocol, serve it with any static server instead:

python3 -m http.server 8000
# then visit http://localhost:8000

Deploy to GitHub Pages

1. Push this repo to GitHub.
2. Go to Settings → Pages.
3. Under Build and deployment, set Source to Deploy from a branch, pick main and / (root).
4. Save — your app will be live at https://<your-username>.github.io/OrbitOrg/ within a minute or two.

Project structure

OrbitOrg/
├── index.html # markup
├── style.css # deep-space theme, orbit layout, reduced-motion handling
├── script.js # GitHub API calls, orbit positioning math, SVG rendering
└── README.md

Data source

All data comes from the public GitHub REST API, specifically the /orgs/{org} and /orgs/{org}/repos endpoints. No authentication, no API key, no user data is stored — every search is a fresh, live request.

License

MIT — use this however you'd like.