Gaining 54k GitHub stars
HTTPie for Terminal is celebrating 10 years since the first commit.
If you’re unfamiliar with the project, it’s an open-source CLI HTTP client. What makes HTTPie different is that we build it from the ground up to make API interaction from the terminal as human-friendly as possible.
Starting with the first public release, published on the 25th of February 2012 from a rainy Copenhagen, we’ve hosted the project on GitHub.
I’ve been a GitHub fan ever since I became a member a couple of years earlier (the type that wears Octocat-decorated t-shirts, no less). It was back in the day when GitHub’s about page proudly proclaimed they took $0.00 in VC funding and informed you about the number of delicious beers on tap in their SF office.
So GitHub was an obvious choice when I realized that the result of scratching my own API testing itch might be of interest to the wider developer community. And of interest it was.
I remember the rush of HTTPie becoming the top link on Hacker News for the first time and seeing the GitHub community build up. Over the years as we continued to improve the project it kept attracting widespread adoption. It became the most popular API tool on the platform, and the GitHub community grew to 54k stargazers and 1k+ watchers.
There are 289M public repos so HTTPie was among the top 80 most popular public repos on GitHub overall; in the 99.99997203 percentile. In short, It was incredible to see this humble tool attract a community of that magnitude. And GitHub played an important role in that.
In the same way that we benefited from GitHub’s “social coding” features, GitHub benefited from our hosting this popular project on their platform. Over the past decade, possibly millions of developers visited our GitHub page. That’s helped reinforce GitHub (Microsoft) as a company that cares about open source and community. It was a symbiotic relationship.
Losing 54k GitHub stars
However, if you are one of our 55k stargazers and watchers, as of a few weeks ago you no longer are 💔
What happened?
Due to an unfortunate sequence of events, I accidentally made the project’s repository private for a moment. And GitHub cascade-deleted our community that took 10 years to build.
What does it mean?
If you’re a downstream maintainer or anyone previously watching httpie/httpie for notifications, for example, you’ll need to re-watch the repo. Incidentally, we’ve recently published a security release.
The same goes for stars. If you’re one of those 54K people who’ve starred the repo any time in the past decade, the repo is no longer among your starred projects.
Why did you make the repo private‽
It’s a peculiarity of GitHub, to put it mildly, that making a repo private permanently deletes all watchers and stars. I was even aware of this, and I obviously had no intention to make httpie/httpie private. So, why then?
The proximate cause was that I thought I was inside a different repo; one with no content and zero stars. What I actually intended to do was to hide the HTTPie organization’s profile README, which I had created the week before but had no opportunity to populate.
What put me on the wrong path was an otherwise completely unrelated action: I had just done the same (i.e., hidden an empty README) on my personal profile by making jakubroztocil/jakubroztocil private.
GitHub’s conceptual model treats users and organizations as very similar entities when it comes to profiles and repos. In this context, and since I just wanted to repeat the same benign action on our organization’s profile, my brain switched to auto-pilot mode.
I didn’t realize at the moment there’s an inconsistency in the naming of this special repo containing
