Git Arsenal

Six hundred repositories, one front door.

Git Arsenal is a branded catalogue of everything on MrZaKaRiA's GitHub account, built by RAIN as an in-house product. Over the years that account had grown into a personal library of hundreds of open-source tools: self-hosted platforms, AI projects, frameworks, admin templates and utilities, most of them forked to keep a copy close at hand, plus the owner's own projects. GitHub's repository list is a poor way to browse a library that size. It shows names and one-line descriptions, with no screenshots, no sense of what each tool replaces, and a README buried below the file tree. The brief was a front door to that toolbox that looks like the studio, finds anything in a few keystrokes and keeps itself up to date, with no database, no CMS and nobody re-entering data. It runs at git.mrzakaria.com under the name "MrZaKaRiA Git — The Open-Source Arsenal".

Under the hood, Git Arsenal is a Next.js 16 and React 19 site whose only data source is the GitHub REST API. A server-side pipeline pages through every public repository on the account, up to a thousand, and turns each raw record into a catalogue entry: a readable display name, tags drawn from GitHub topics, the primary language and a keyword map, a language colour, and optional hand-curated notes for the tools that matter most, such as which commercial products they are an alternative to. The home page is a searchable, filterable grid; every repository also gets its own page with stats, alternatives, an image gallery taken from its README, and a tabbed reader for the README, licence, contributing guide, code of conduct and security policy. Pages are generated statically and refreshed with incremental static regeneration, plus a weekly Vercel Cron call to a secret-protected revalidation endpoint. Most of the engineering went into API economy, so a catalogue of six hundred repositories stays inside GitHub's rate limits. The interface follows the studio's own visual language: near-black or near-white, an electric-lime accent and frosted-glass panels, in light, dark and system themes.

Six systems that turn raw GitHub data into a catalogue, and six that keep it fast, cheap and on-brand.

A toolbox of six hundred repositories that updates itself every week.

Git Arsenal turns a GitHub account that had become too big to browse into a catalogue that is quick to search and good to look at. Nobody maintains it: forking or publishing a repository is the whole workflow, and the weekly refresh does the rest. Curation is a short config file, used only for the tools worth highlighting. Visitors get one consistent page per tool, with what it does, what it replaces, how active it is, its licence and its README, in the same visual language as the studio's own site.

The site was built in about five weeks of commits, from 20 June to 23 July 2026, and deployed on Vercel at git.mrzakaria.com. The July work was mostly about scale: as the account grew past five hundred repositories, README calls moved off the home page, community-file checks collapsed into a single request per repository, and pre-rendering was capped at the top 15 projects so builds stay inside GitHub's rate limits. On 2 October 2026, a run of the production build refreshed from the public GitHub API catalogued 606 public repositories in 37 languages under 89 tags. 590 of them are forks of open-source projects by other teams, kept as a working library, and 16 are the owner's own. No traffic or performance figures are published, so none are claimed here.