Default Filters

What gets filtered

By default, stars applies several filters to keep the output useful. These run automatically unless you pass --no-defaults.

Filter	Default	What it does
Archived repos	Excluded	Hides repos marked as archived on GitHub
Stale repos	Excluded if >365 days	Hides repos not pushed to in over a year
Language exclusions	PHP, C#, Java, Python, Ruby	Hides repos in these languages
Forks	Included	Forks are not excluded by default

Bypassing filters

To see everything in your database, unfiltered:

stars --no-defaults

This shows all repos regardless of archive status, age, language, or fork status.

Customizing filters

Change excluded languages

# See current exclusions
stars config get defaults.filters.exclude_languages
# => [PHP, C#, Java, Python, Ruby]

# Remove all language exclusions
stars config set defaults.filters.exclude_languages []

# Only exclude PHP
stars config set defaults.filters.exclude_languages [PHP]

Show archived repos

stars config set defaults.filters.exclude_archived false

Exclude forks

Forks are included by default. To exclude them:

stars config set defaults.filters.exclude_forks true

Change the staleness threshold

The default is 365 days. To show repos not pushed in up to 2 years:

stars config set defaults.filters.min_pushed_days 730

To effectively disable the staleness filter, set a very large number:

stars config set defaults.filters.min_pushed_days 99999

How filters work internally

Filters are applied in mod.nu’s apply-default-filters function:

1. Read filter settings from config (with hardcoded fallbacks)
2. Calculate the cutoff date: (date now) - (min_pushed_days * 1day)
3. For each repo, check:
   • archived — stored as integer (0/1) in SQLite, converted to bool
   • fork — same integer-to-bool conversion
   • language — checked against the exclusion list (empty language always passes)
   • pushed_at — parsed to datetime and compared against cutoff
4. A repo must pass all active filters to appear in output

Caution

The archived and fork columns in SQLite are stored as integers (0/1), not booleans. The filter logic handles both representations, but if you’re querying the database directly with --raw, be aware of this.

Pipeline-based filtering

For ad-hoc filtering beyond the defaults, use Nushell pipelines:

# Only Rust repos with 100+ stars
stars --raw | where language == "Rust" | where stargazers_count > 100

# Repos pushed in the last 30 days
stars --raw | where { ($in.pushed_at | into datetime) > ((date now) - 30day) }

# Repos with specific topics
stars --raw | where { "machine-learning" in ($in.topics | from json) }