Top 20 Most Popular JavaScript Repositories on GitHub in 2021

Open-source software has been gaining traction in recent years. In open-source projects, developers interact with each other and with the community at large to create the final project. The largest stage providing a platform for such projects is GitHub.

And when it comes to the popularity of programming languages, JavaScript is the leader here. According to the GitHub State of the Octoverse report (in the diagram below), JavaScript consistently remains the most popular programming language in terms of project contributors.

In this article, we’ll take a look at twenty of the most popular open-source JavaScript repositories on GitHub. I made the rating based on the number of stars in the repository.

Rating

First Place: FreeCodeCamp — 329k Stars

FreeCodeCamp is a non-profit organization dedicated to making web development training available to everyone. It includes an interactive web learning platform, an online community forum, chat rooms, article publishing. Its founder, Quincy Larson, as a school principal, set out to learn to program to create tools to make schools more efficient. Realizing how inaccessible programming learning was to the masses, he decided to create a fully interactive, inclusive, and free platform for mutual programming learning. This is how freeCodeCamp was born. The organization has over 4 million YouTube subscribers.

Second place: Vue — 187k stars

Vue is a web framework for developing JavaScript user interfaces. It allows you to create complex single-page applications and solves various tasks of the presentation layer (view) and simplifies the work with other libraries. It was created by Google employee Evan You, who in 2013 concluded that there are no ready-made solutions for quickly prototyping complex user interfaces of web applications: React was just gaining popularity, and AngularJS and Backbone.js were complex frameworks for developing large applications. There is a small documentary about the history of Vue.

If React was not given to you for some reason and the thought that you need to know a framework for front-end development, Vue is the best solution for you. It’s simple, has clear documentation, and it’s harder to shoot yourself in the foot than with other web frameworks.

Third place: React — 173k stars

React.js is a library that is used to build user interfaces specifically for single-page applications. It is used to handle the view layer for web and mobile applications. React was created by Jordan Walke, a software engineer at Facebook. React was first posted on Facebook in 2011 and on Instagram in 2012.

According to a 2020 Stack Overflow poll, React is voted the most favorite developer tool for front-end development.

JavaScript-algorithms — 117k stars

JavaScript-algorithms is a repository of the Ukrainian Oleksii Trekhleb, where popular algorithms and data structures implemented in JavaScript are presented, with explanations and links to additional literature.

JavaScript — 113k stars

The JavaScript Style Guide is a set of standards and guidelines for writing JavaScript code from Airbnb engineers.

I advise all novice web developers to familiarize themselves with it. The guide describes not so much the rules for the stylistic design of the code, like tips for competent and understandable writing code in JavaScript. In a few hours spent studying the guide, novice developers will have a deeper understanding of JavaScript than a couple of days of trial and error at work and consulting with senior colleagues.

D3–98k stars

D3.js (Data-Driven Documents) was created by Mike Bostock of the New York Times to develop more interactive data visualizations using web technologies. D3 takes advantage of core web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, CSS3, Canvas, and SVG.

D3.js can both scare you with a large list of available functions in the documentation, and please with an extensive list of manuals and books on using this library.

React Native — 97k stars

React Native is a JavaScript framework for developing mobile apps for iOS and Android platforms. In other words: web developers can use it to write mobile applications that look and feel “native”. In addition, since most of the code you write can be used across platforms, React Native makes it easy to develop for both Android and iOS concurrently.

You think “Cheeki-Breeki and queens” — a simple application development as a team immediately to the two platforms? There are also problems: the RN performance is inferior to the native solution, when developing your own modules you may end up with three codebases (RN, Android, and iOS), it is still in beta, you need a superficial knowledge of native development.

Create React App— 89k stars

One of the main complaints about React in the past was that it was difficult to get started building the application. This required connecting Webpack / Brunch / Browserify / the like. And for a novice developer, this is still a challenge. Of course, one could (and still can) connect React library through the CDN, but without some of the subtleties that come with React development environment.

Create React App is the officially supported way to create single-page React applications that solved all the difficulties that arose. Namely:

• You do not need to know and configure different tools to “start” React;
• Your application needs only one assembly dependency;
• “Under the hood” is used webpack, Babel, ESLint, and much more.
• If you ever need an advanced configuration, you can eject the project and directly edit its configuration files.

Axios — 86K stars

Axios is a popular library for making HTTP requests to RESTful or GraphQL APIs. Axios performs the same task as the fetch API provided by many browsers. Uses Promise under the hood.

30-seconds-of-code — 81k stars

30-seconds-of-code is a collection of ES6 snippets and helper functions: helper functions for working with primitives, arrays, and objects, as well as algorithms, DOM manipulation functions, and Node.js utilities. The repository is not limited only to JavaScript, there are snippets for the web, Git, Python.

Node — 81k stars

Node.js is a cross-platform JavaScript back-end runtime that runs on the V8 engine and executes code outside of the website. Node.js is a “JavaScript for All” paradigm that brings web applications together in a single programming language, rather than different ones for the server and client.

Believe it or not, Node.js is 12 years old this year.

Angular — 75k stars

Angular is a framework for building single-page client applications. Uses the command line interface (Angular CLI) to create projects, generate application and library code, and perform a variety of current development tasks such as testing, bundling, and deployment.

Google employee Misko Hevery worked on a side project that was supposed to simplify the process of creating web applications. His solution was released in 2010 as an open-source project called AngularJS and has become heavily used by the front-end developer community and some major brands. Several years later, there were new updates to JavaScript, and the team was forced to rewrite AngularJS from scratch based on TypeScript.

JS has been omitted from the name of the framework to avoid confusion. Major updates happen every six months, and the latest — Angular 11 — was released in the fall of 2020.

Three.js — 73k stars

Three.js lets you create GPU-accelerated 3D animations in JavaScript. It uses WebGL, a low-level system that only draws points, lines, and triangles. Doing anything useful with WebGL usually requires a lot of extra code, and this is where three.js comes in handy. This library can use WebGL to render your scenes in all modern browsers. A large number of developers are working on the library. The main ideologist and creator is Ricardo Cobello, known under the creative pseudonym Mr. Dob.

Next.js — 72k stars

Next.js is a popular React framework. It allows you to generate static sites (SSG) and do server-side rendering (SSR) without the need for configuration. Also out of the box, it has image optimization, text internationalization, analytics, TypeScript support, and much more.

Material-UI — 70k stars

Material UI is a component library for React, replete with powerful components that you can use in your projects. If you just want to create a beautiful app, Material UI provides robust, pre-styled components to help speed up project development.

Webpack — 59k stars

Webpack is a static module builder for modern JavaScript applications. With webpack you can:

• Transpile JavaScript to an older standard thanks to Babel, allowing you to use the latest JavaScript features without having to worry about whether your browser supports them or not.
• Start “local” server and livereload.
• Monitor changes and rerun tasks.
• Split the output file into multiple files to avoid slow page loading due to large JS file size and much more.

Reveal.js — 57k stars

Reveal.js is an HTML presentation framework that allows anyone with a web browser to create fully functional and beautiful presentations for free. Reveal.js includes a wide range of features such as nested slides, Markdown support, automatic animations, PDF export, presenter notes, and code syntax highlighting.

jQuery — 55k stars

jQuery is a fast, small and feature-rich JavaScript library. It offers a suite of HTML manipulation, event handling, animation, and asynchronous requests through an easy-to-use API that works across multiple browsers.

The repository does not need a separate presentation. If you are reading this article, then you have dealt with it. I remember when I was just getting acquainted with the web, I thought that “$” is the syntax of the language and not the name of the function.

Socket.io — 54k stars

Socket.io is a cross-browser library that provides “event-based” interoperability for real-time applications. Consists of two parts: a client library that runs in the browser and a server library for Node.js. Both components have the same API.

Gatsby — 51k stars

Gatsby is a static site generator built on a JAM approach (JavaScript, APIs & Markup). In short, Gatsby can query data from the server through GraphQL, generate a js bundle with webpack, and deploy pre-built HTML, CSS, and React pages to the server.

Conclusion

JavaScript is currently one of the most commonly used programming languages and an in-demand skill in the IT industry. Since the language itself is constantly being improved with new features such as Optional Chaining and Nullish Coalescing, the widespread adoption of TypeScript takes the language to a whole new level by popularizing static typing.

When creating this rating, I noticed that during my work in the frontend, I did not know/did not use only 4 out of 20 repositories — I am sure that many of the repositories are already familiar to most readers. I am also impressed that many of these repositories directly or indirectly include the React ecosystem. I consider this library to be one of the best solutions for creating applications. It is also interesting that the #1-star rating on GitHub is not a tool/library/framework, but an educational platform for learning programming.

The reader may have a question: “Hey, where in this top, for example, bootstrap with 152k or Angular.js with 59k stars?” In my opinion, JavaScript is not the main part of bootstrap, and Angular.js is no longer officially supported. It should be remembered that there are no exact statistics on the popularity of repositories and the use of JavaScript in them, so the rating presented is a somewhat subjective selection of the author, it may differ from the generally accepted opinion. So share in the comments — what popular repositories would you add?