1,527 public repositories, 1.9m commits, 3,306 committers, 2011–2026.
Every public repository in github.com/alphagov was mirror-cloned in full and
mined from its git history rather than the GitHub API alone, then cross-referenced against the
GOV.UK Developer Documentation - the
team's own written account of how it works. This site reports what 1,527 repositories, 1.9m commits and 3,306 people actually did, and
where that diverges from the documented standard.
The estate at a glance
1,527
public repositories
185 are forks of other projects
428
not archived
1,099 archived (72% of the estate)
1.9m
commits analysed
across 1,523 repositories with history
3,306
distinct human committers
plus 55 automated identities
21.7 GB
of git data
full mirrors, every branch and tag
82
languages detected
862.8 MB of source
15
years of history
org created February 2011
22%
of commits are bots
dependency bots and CI identities
What stands out
Roughly 72% of the estate is archived.
1,099 of 1,527 repositories are read-only. That is not neglect so much as a decade and a half of deliberate turnover: GDS has consistently retired work rather than leaving it to rot in place. The live estate is the 428 repositories that remain, and only those are a fair basis for judging current practice.
135 live repositories have not been touched since 2023.
They are not archived, so they still read as supported, but 32% of the active estate has had no push in over two years. This is the gap between 'archived' and 'actually maintained' - the population where dependency drift accumulates unobserved.
March 2020 is the busiest month of GDS's pandemic year.
12,488 commits, up 24% on February and the highest of any month in 2020. GOV.UK was the country's primary channel for lockdown guidance, and the commit log registers that without anyone having to label it. Activity stayed elevated through April (10,217) and May (9,708) before settling back. It is not an all-time peak - 2024-01 is larger, at 32,327 commits - and an earlier version of this note claimed otherwise.
135 repositories are documented; 1,392 are not.
The GOV.UK Developer Documentation covers 135 repositories in detail - the core publishing platform. That is 9% of the org by count, and 116 of them are still live, or 27% of the active estate. The undocumented remainder is mostly archived experiments, prototypes and alpha work.
Shape of the estate
Repository status
Archived repositories are read-only. GDS archives aggressively, which is healthier than the alternative but makes the raw repository count a poor measure of the live system.
Active, own code
Active fork of a third party
Archived (read-only)
Repositories created each year
The 2017 peak coincides with the GaaP era - Notify, Pay, Registers - and a wave of departmental prototyping.
Year of last push
A decay curve. The 2026 spike is the live estate; everything left of it has stopped moving.
Volume of work
Commits per year, from git history
Measured from the commits themselves across every branch and tag, not from GitHub's activity graph.
The same history, month by month
Monthly resolution shows the texture the yearly view flattens: the long climb to the mid-2010s peak, the plateau, and the bot-driven noise of the Dependabot era. The busiest single month was 2024-01 with 32,327 commits.
Languages
Primary language, by repository count
GitHub's headline language per repository. Ruby is the house language of GOV.UK publishing; Python dominates the data and alerting estate.
What GDS built
GDS has never been one product. Repository names carry the programme they were built for, and
those prefixes outlive the programmes themselves – which makes them the clearest surviving
record of what the organisation worked on, and when it stopped.
Repositories per programme
Classified by naming convention. 'Other / experimental' is the long tail of prototypes, spikes and one-off tools.
GitHub topics, as set by GDS itself
An independent check on the classification above: topics are applied by hand, and 952 of 1,527 repositories (62%) carry at least one. The ranking closely tracks the name-derived programmes, which is reassuring for both.
Commits per year, by programme
The rise and fall of each programme, measured in actual commits rather than announcements.
Other / experimental
GOV.UK publishing
Forked third-party
GOV.UK Verify
Infrastructure & platform
GOV.UK Pay
GDS corporate & internal
Performance Platform
Design System & Frontend
GOV.UK Notify
One Login / Digital Identity
data.gov.uk
Training & learning
Cyber security
Accessibility
Emergency Alerts
Registers
Programme life-spans
The period covering the middle 98% of each programme's commits. Deliberately not first-to-last commit: Emergency Alerts was built from the Notify codebase and inherited a stray 2011 commit with it, which made both programmes appear to start a decade before they existed. Trimming the tails ignores inherited and vendored history and answers the question actually being asked – when was this being worked on.
UK Public Sector GitHub Observatory