dependents.info

What It Is

dependents.info is a README display tool for GitHub repositories. Its core purpose is to turn GitHub network dependents data into images or badges, making it easy for maintainers to show “which repositories depend on this project.” It is not a general-purpose dependency management platform, but rather a small tool focused on showcasing and archiving project impact.

Core Features and Integrations

The site provides a quickstart: enter owner/repo to generate copyable image and badge embed code. Images and badges are generated on request and cached for 7 days; they may also be affected by Cloudflare caching of up to roughly one day and GitHub’s image cache. Badges support parameters such as logo, label, color, logoColor, labelColor, and style. The style is similar to shields.io, and simple-icons icon names can be used.

For a more complete setup, you can configure a GitHub Action. The Action crawls the repository’s network dependents page and submits the data to the backend, which then generates images and badges. Configuration options include the maximum number of pages to crawl, whether to force submission, package-id, deduplication across multiple owners, excluding repositories from the same owner, excluding users, uploading artifacts, and more. For repositories with multiple packages, package-id can be used to specify the target package.

Pricing, Openness, and Security

The main documentation does not disclose pricing plans, quotas, payment methods, or whether the project is open source or self-hostable. On the security side, the Action requires the id-token: write permission to request a GitHub OIDC token. The backend uses this token to verify that the data really comes from the corresponding repository’s GitHub Action, reducing the risk of forged submissions. The documentation explains the meaning of this permission fairly clearly.

Pros, Cons, and Who It’s For

Its strengths are a low barrier to entry, straightforward README presentation, detailed GitHub Action configuration, and support for multi-package repositories and data source verification. Its limitations are that the feature scope is very narrow and it is not suitable for dependency analysis or security scanning; the caching mechanism can cause update delays; customization is limited if you do not use the Action; and there is insufficient information about the project’s business model, service reliability, and deployment options.

It is suitable for open-source library authors, tool library maintainers, and GitHub projects that want to showcase ecosystem adoption. The documentation does not mention accessibility from China. Because it depends on GitHub, Cloudflare, and remote image loading, actual availability may be affected by the network environment. Possible alternatives include shields.io custom badges, GitHub Insights/Dependency Graph, and deps.dev.