TL;DR - Key Take-aways

GitHub Actions dominates CI/CD, Make is omnipresent, and new package managers like uv and pnpm are popular in new repos.

How and why I counted

Every software project accretes snippets of code for developers to execute that are outside the primary codebase. These are named and saved in shell scripts, configs for build tools, package managers, CI runners, and occasionally just code blocks in the README. To find out what people are actually doing in 2025, I crawled the 100,000 most starred repos on GitHub and checked what config files they had. The primary motivation was figuring out what I should support in dela, my delegating task runner.

The Leaderboards

Most used task runners

Of the top 100,000 starred repos, 72,804 had detectable task runners. For repo counts, y axis is the total number of repos in which a task runner was detected. For star counts, y axis is the cumulative sum of stars in the detected repos. To be included in the chart, the task runner had to appear in at least 100 repos.

Most used since 2025-01-01

Below are charts only for the repositories created since 2025-01-01 that feature in the top 100k starred repositories. 1,127 repositories made this year have made it into the top 100k most starred repos overall. To be included in the chart, the task runner also had to appear in at least 10 of those repositories.

A taxonomy of task runners

There is a continuum of tooling that can execute code, but not all executions could be considered tasks. My criteria is that the tool is meant to work with the repository and has well-known patterns that could be detected from filenames. This means that things like Python scripts and shell scripts are out because their domain of utility can’t be localized to the repository. Any code that is meant to be run by the user rather than by the developer is also out, such as arg parsers for CLI tools. GitHub Actions, on the other hand, are included because they deal with the repository and are run on behalf of the developer even if they are not typically executed locally.

• Build Tool - Tools to manage caching of dependencies when compiling but allow arbitrary code execution. make is the prototypical example and is probably the inspiration for most tools in this and other categories.
• Package Manager - Package managers like npm and uv can have a list of tasks they execute, even though it is not their primary purpose.
• Easy CLI - These are tools that make it easy to create code that is callable from the shell by developers, but not meant to be distributed. Examples include rake and invoke, which turn Ruby and Python methods into tasks invokable via the shell.
• Task Runner - This is a category for pure task runners that aren’t coupled to another major feature; just and go-task are examples.
• CI/CD Tool - Like build tools but running on somebody else’s infrastructure and also allow arbitrary code execution.
• Process Manager - Orchestrate concurrent tasks and supervise their execution. Useful for production servers like systemd, but also used in development like foreman.

Make & GitHub Actions - General Purpose Leaders

GitHub Actions appears in 39.8% of the repositories, beating out the next best of 13.9% for Travis CI and 2.1% for Circle CI in the CI/CD category. That is an amazing victory for GitHub, because GitHub Actions only launched in 2019 and was free for public repositories from the start. Travis CI had a head start with being free for public repositories since 2011, but in 2020 switched to free for open source with manual review on a case-by-case basis only. Circle CI has been free for open source projects since 2014.

At 49 years old, make makes its presence seen in 19.0% of the repos. This is remarkable considering how much of present-day software is written in languages that don’t need a build step or have it provided by a special tool in their own ecosystem. I attribute part of its continued success to its ability to be used as a general-purpose task runner via the .PHONY build targets. Trailing it are bazel at 1.5% in the build tools category and just at just 0.4% in the task runner category.

27.2% of the repos did not have a detected task runner at all. The most popular of these is build-your-own-x with 392,036 stars at the time of the scan.

JavaScript ecosystem - pnpm rising

With 28.5% of all repos, npm is at the top of the pack in the JavaScript ecosystem and makes JS the most popular language ecosystem. In the jockeying for 2nd and 3rd place for JS package managers, pnpm came out from behind to land in 2nd place for new 2025 repos and 3rd place overall. pnpm is being used in 22.9% of all new JS repos made since 2025. This is a larger share than yarn ever had.

repository counts	all time	since 2025
npm	28,537	381
yarn	6,407	123
pnpm	2,949	34

Below chart includes vite and webpack to give a better sense of the JavaScript ecosystem even though they doesn’t have task runner capabilities.

Python ecosystem - uv rising

Unlike with npm, Python’s pip never had task running capability and the rest of the ecosystem mostly ignored it. This changed in 2024 with the introduction of uv, a package manager with built-in Python version management, virtual env management, and a task runner. In new 2025 repos, it features in 111 repos, behind pip’s 359. The scripts for crawling GitHub and analyzing the data for this blog post were managed with uv; it did the job superbly and I believe it makes the entire Python ecosystem much less frustrating to work with.

Below chart includes pip to give a better sense of the Python ecosystem even though pip doesn’t have task runner capabilities.

Appendix

All data was collected between June 28th 2025 and June 30th 2025. It took over 2 days due to throttling by the GitHub API.

Raw Data for repos for all time

	repo_count	repo_star_sum
markdown	93,899	257,666,001
github-actions	39,887	145,915,497
shell	33,467	114,956,898
npm	28,537	97,856,719
make	19,032	62,019,140
travis	13,854	36,280,958
pip	13,631	45,815,994
gradle	7,736	21,506,934
cmake	6,771	21,378,866
docker-compose	6,763	28,691,894
yarn	6,407	22,940,015
maven	3,653	10,743,067
pre-commit	3,632	15,923,362
webpack	3,623	15,298,638
vite	3,285	16,087,352
composer	3,135	8,926,252
pnpm	2,949	15,273,677
rake	2,347	5,621,344
rollup	2,188	10,415,155
circleci	2,099	8,289,536
tox	1,869	5,856,762
systemd	1,867	8,184,455
vscode	1,866	7,513,544
cargo-build	1,842	9,066,070
gulp	1,693	5,928,974
swiftpm	1,583	5,193,074
bazel	1,490	7,193,741
grunt	1,394	4,110,083
nuget	1,189	3,300,761
poetry	1,060	4,014,551
lerna	928	4,864,685
procfile	903	2,894,180
phing	895	2,519,263
ant	895	2,519,263
gitlab-ci	829	2,075,141
azure-pipelines	777	2,838,436
uv	701	3,995,535
invoke	661	3,022,648
turborepo	608	3,682,210
meson	589	2,169,901
jenkins	563	1,719,842
sbt	445	1,100,879
supervisord	392	1,685,263
fastlane	367	1,208,371
just	355	1,364,840
buck2	349	1,202,698
mix	339	839,784
nx	311	2,014,084
leiningen	297	782,857
cabal	283	818,680
nodemon	271	1,550,398
bun-scripts	252	1,180,182
shell-alias	237	623,672
conan	226	947,116
scons	223	692,693
task	218	1,002,404
drone-ci	207	770,556
platformio	197	461,412
deno	188	982,639
nox	178	654,004
pm2	122	628,557
cargo-xtask	98	506,220
mise	94	329,008
buildkite	91	278,072
cake	87	306,508
foreman	86	368,333
cargo-make	85	559,584
pdm	79	209,206
parcel	65	364,426
ninja	53	312,692
ivy	51	203,225
mage	41	361,134
bitbucket-pipelines	32	109,011
earthly	28	193,989
rush	23	109,279
hatch	19	56,163
robo	15	51,481
monit	14	111,144
doit	10	32,850
jbang	9	79,420
zed	6	80,746
circus	5	6,594
forever	5	27,642
argc	3	8,707
fleet	0	0
nur	0	0
go-xtask	0	0
intellij	0	0

Raw Data for repos created since 2025-01-01

	repo_count	repo_star_sum
markdown	1,113	2,501,768
github-actions	464	1,312,773
shell	416	1,010,159
npm	381	932,215
pip	359	789,240
docker-compose	172	441,879
make	154	464,705
pnpm	123	287,826
vite	114	201,220
uv	111	305,394
pre-commit	83	217,553
cmake	37	76,813
yarn	34	72,531
turborepo	33	76,920
cargo-build	27	91,077
gradle	26	54,924
poetry	21	39,178
vscode	16	73,837
maven	16	37,993
travis	15	42,690
supervisord	15	39,830
swiftpm	14	48,631
invoke	12	17,009
webpack	11	21,924
bun-scripts	11	21,610
rollup	11	16,502
composer	10	11,287
rake	9	18,844
gitlab-ci	8	10,180
just	7	37,098
deno	6	5,764
nx	6	7,261
nodemon	5	13,205
tox	5	17,944
mise	4	6,653
shell-alias	4	7,480
platformio	4	7,322
bazel	4	8,863
systemd	3	18,269
azure-pipelines	3	3,782
pdm	3	9,154
nuget	3	4,662
procfile	3	5,431
nox	2	18,424
lerna	2	4,292
meson	2	15,532
scons	2	17,517
gulp	2	2,686
foreman	2	6,998
task	2	2,447
jenkins	1	1,761
buildkite	1	6,269
circleci	1	1,182
conan	1	4,800
pm2	1	613
earthly	1	4,369
ninja	1	564
rush	1	5,721
mix	1	1,120
fastlane	1	2,002
sbt	1	4,203
robo	0	0
ant	0	0
phing	0	0
forever	0	0
bitbucket-pipelines	0	0
buck2	0	0
cabal	0	0
cake	0	0
cargo-make	0	0
cargo-xtask	0	0
circus	0	0
doit	0	0
drone-ci	0	0
fleet	0	0
go-xtask	0	0
parcel	0	0
grunt	0	0
hatch	0	0
intellij	0	0
ivy	0	0
jbang	0	0
leiningen	0	0
mage	0	0
argc	0	0
monit	0	0
nur	0	0
zed	0	0