best-of-generator

The CLI tool behind every list in best-of-lists. MIT, 110★/20 forks, created 2020-11-26, last updated 2026-07-13 (read 2026-08-10). Maintained by Benjamin Räthlein, Lukas Masuch, Jan Kalkan and Johannes Rieke.

Input is a projects.yaml naming projects, categories and labels. The tool queries GitHub or GitLab plus the package registries a project publishes to — PyPI, npm, Conda, Docker Hub, Maven, Cargo, Go, libraries.io — computes a project-quality-score for each entry, sorts by it, and writes a markdown README with install snippets, medal placings and a trending section. Configuration can hide entries below a minimum star count, minimum score, or outside an allowed licence list. A bundled GitHub Action re-runs the whole thing on a schedule and diffs the scores against a stored history to produce the 📈📉 trending markers.

Two consequences follow. The generated page is derived data, not a document: editing it does nothing, and the only editable surface is the yaml. And the tool decides what is visible through min_stars / min_projectrank / allowed_licenses thresholds — so a list’s contents are shaped by the generator’s defaults as much as by its curator’s choices.

Cross-spoke: as a build-and-publish tool it sits closer to ../dev-tooling-wiki’s domain than to this spoke’s; it is paged here because the artifact it produces is the subject.