ReviveDeadRepos is a site and toolset for finding abandoned, forgotten, or overlooked open source projects that still have potential. It surfaces old repositories that haven’t been updated in years, but that could be rebuilt, maintained, forked, or studied.
This isn’t just a scanner, however. It’s a community effort to map the quiet parts of open source and help bring them back.
- Indexes GitHub repositories with signs of abandonment
- Ranks them by "deadness" using a custom DeadScore ;)
- Lets users suggest interesting but inactive repos
- Surfaces forks, related tools, or successors
- Tracks adoption efforts and forks that attempt to modernize them
- Makes it easier to take over, learn from, or rebuild older codebases
A lot of code is left behind. Tools that solved real problems, libraries that did one thing well, or entire projects that just never had enough eyes on them. Some were ahead of their time. Some were never finished. Some still work, quietly, without a maintainer.
Not everything needs to be saved. But a few things are worth returning to.
This project is in early development. It will likely consist of:
- A static or Svelte-based frontend
- A GitHub API-powered backend or data fetcher
- A searchable archive of candidate repos
The MVP will likely just be a manually curated list, with automated scanning and scoring added over time.
If you’re interested in helping:
- Suggest a repository
- Help design the scoring system
- Build a scanner or frontend
- Fork and maintain one of the repos we list
No approvals, no gatekeeping. If something seems worth reviving, go for it.
MIT, like many of the projects we're trying to bring back.
