How to generate stats for a GitHub project?

You can try applying gitstats to a cloned repo of your GitHub repo.

See for example the activity of the Git repo itself, with many data like the commits per year/month:

See also "Looking at Git Statistics", with the GitHub 'yearly_stats' for a simple little script.

Update April 2013 ("Get up to speed with Pulse"):

Check out Pulse

Pulse is a great way to discover recent activity on projects.
Maybe you haven't checked on your favorite repository in a while or you just discovered a project that looks interesting to you. Pulse will show you who has been actively committing and what has changed in a project's default branch:

You can find the link to the left of the nav bar.

You should have a look to repoXplorer, an open source project I develop. It is able to compute stats for a project (a group of git repositories) as well as for a contributor and a group of contributors. It provides a REST interface and a web UI. The web UI provides various information like, for a project:

• commits and authors count
• date histogram of commits
• date histogram of authors
• top authors by commits
• top authors by lines changed
• top new authors compared to a given period

But best is to have a look to the demo instance here.

Here is a screenshot of the stats of the Kubernetes project (all git repositories of github organization of kubernetes):

Now there are several tools that you could use (e.g. see this rather complete list: https://livablesoftware.com/tools-mine-analyze-github-git-software-data/ )

The right tool for you will also depend on you're just interested in the "git" part of the project or the "GitHub" part (i.e. stats on community activity).

I'd start by checking GrimoireLab , Apache Kibble and Sourced. They all allow you to configure and create a dashboard to display several metrics around your project