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Ash HN: Who is cloning my GitHub repo?

4 points by puttycat ↗ HN
I have several github repos that frequently get cloned according to the Insights > Traffic page.

These repos are of no special interest to anyone, at least not on a level that will make regular cloning beneficial.

My best guess was that these are crawlers that regularly clone all repos on github, but the clones aren't evenly spaced so it doesn't look automatic.

Are these git clone-crawlers after all?

7 comments

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version_five
I've seen the same thing. Presumably there's lots of misc crawling and scraping going on so you wouldn't expect it to regular, it's not just one org doint periodic updates.
cratermoon
LLM training models
puttycat
Why not crawl directly from the github frontend though?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
cratermoon
Good question. I'm making the assumption that cloning an entire repo with all the history and configuration is much easier and generates less total request traffic than hitting the front end or even using the API.