How to exclude bot from Insights > Contributors

[banagale]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

Body

An org I work with has a release bot that shows up in the Insights > Contributors list as #1 and it blows away the graphs' perspectives because it has an outsized number of commits.

How do you exclude a given user from appearing in the Insights > Contributors view?

[crackle2k]

No Built-in Way to Exclude a User

Unfortunately, there's no built-in way to exclude a specific user from the Insights > Contributors graph. GitHub doesn't expose any filter or blocklist for that view.

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Why Your Bot Might Be Showing Up

The Contributors graph header says "excluding merge commits and bot accounts," but that exclusion only applies to accounts recognized as GitHub Apps (i.e., accounts with a [bot] suffix in their username, like dependabot[bot] or github-actions[bot]).

If your release bot is a regular user account rather than a GitHub App, GitHub won't recognize it as a bot and will include it in the graph.

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The Fix: Re-create the Bot as a GitHub App Identity

If you control how the bot makes commits, the cleanest solution is to have it commit as a GitHub App identity. GitHub App bot accounts (with a [bot]-suffixed username) are excluded from contributor stats. You can configure commits from a GitHub App token by setting:

git config user.name "your-bot[bot]"
git config user.email "your-bot[bot]@users.noreply.github.com"

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If You Can't Change the Bot Identity

There's no workaround that removes a regular user account from the Contributors view. It's a known limitation that other users have flagged as feedback, so upvoting those discussions is the best way to push GitHub to add a filter toggle.

[artemhrebeniuk]

There is currently no built-in way to exclude a specific user or bot from the Insights → Contributors view on GitHub.

The contributor graphs are generated automatically from the repository’s commit history, and GitHub does not provide a setting to filter out:

• bots,
• service accounts,
• automation users,
• or specific contributors.

A few possible workarounds are:

• Use a separate machine account with fewer direct commits.
• Squash or reduce automated commits.
• Move automated release commits to a different repository if possible.
• Use external analytics tools where contributor filtering is supported.

But natively inside GitHub Insights, contributor exclusion/filtering is not currently supported.

[miladrezanezhad]

Short answer: There's no official way to exclude a bot from Insights > Contributors.

The only workaround that sometimes works:

1-Go to Settings → Default branch

2-Temporarily change the default branch to another branch

3-Change it back to main / master

This forces GitHub to recalculate contributors. If the bot has no recent commits in your main branch, it might disappear after a few hours/days.

If that doesn't work: Unfortunately, you're stuck with the bot in the list. GitHub doesn't offer a "hide bots" feature despite many user requests.

[asaddevx]

Hey @banagale — there is no built-in setting to exclude a specific bot from the Insights > Contributors graph.

Why it's happening

GitHub only auto-excludes bots that are GitHub Apps (usernames ending with [bot], like dependabot[bot]). Your release bot is likely a regular user account, so all its commits are counted.

What you can do

Option 1 (recommended) — Reconfigure your bot to commit as a GitHub App identity:

git config user.name "your-bot[bot]"
git config user.email "your-bot[bot]@users.noreply.github.com"

GitHub will then recognize it as a bot and exclude it from the graph.

Option 2 — Use the ?author={username} filter. Go to https://github.com/orgs/ORGNAME/teams/TEAMNAME/overall-code and filter out the bot with ?author=-botusername.

Option 3 — If you cannot change the bot, you are stuck. GitHub does not offer a way to hide a regular user account from that view.

Bottom line: Change the bot identity or live with it in the graph.

[github-actions[bot]]

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