ghrepo-stats

Have you ever wondered how the number of stargazers or the number of open issues has changed over time for your or any public GitHub repository? I did, so I wrote this small command line tool that will show this data.

ghrepo-stats uses pygithub to collect some statistics from a specific repository using a command line tool and show it using matplotlib or write it to a csv file.

Features

The following sub-commands are supported:

• stars: shows the number of stargazers over time (caveat: stargazers that have removed their star are not shown, as the info is not available)
• issues: shows the number of currently open issues over time
• prs: shows the number of currently open pull requests over time
• commits: shows the number of commits over the last year
• codesize: shows the change of the code size over time measured by the number of added and deleted lines
• issue-life: shows the average life time in days of issues over time (sampled once a week)
• pr-life: shows the average life time in days of issues over time (sampled once a week)

Caution: Using sub-commands related to issues and PRs on repositories with many (open or close) issues will take a lot of time due to API access limitations.

Installation

If you want to try it, you can install it from PyPi:

pip install ghrepo-stats

Or you can install the current main branch from GitHub:

pip install git+https://github.com/mrbean-bremen/ghrepo-stats

Usage

To use this, you need a GitHub account and a personal access token able to read public repositories for your GitHub account. The user name and token is expected to be found in the file ghrepo-stats.ini, either in the repository root, or in your home path.

The contents should be in the form:

[auth]
username = my-github-username
token = 123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef012345678

To get usage information you can now type:

$ show-ghstats -h
usage: show-ghstats [-h] [--verbose] [--csv CSV] sub_command repo_name

Shows GitHub repo statistics

positional arguments:
  sub_command    The kind of statistics to show. Possible values: 'issues',
                 'prs', 'stars', 'commits', 'codesize', 'issue-life', 'pr-
                 life'.
  repo_name      Full repository name in the form <repo_owner>/<repo_name>.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help     show this help message and exit
  --verbose, -v  Outputs diagnostic information
  --csv CSV      Write the output into a csv file with the given file path

So, for example, to get a star plot of a specific repository, you can write:

$ show-ghstats stars "my-github-username/my-repo"

If you want to have the numbers saved in a csv file instead to play around with the numbers you can write:

$ show-ghstats stars "my-github-username/my-repo" --csv=my_repo-issues

This will write a file my_repo-issues.csv with the numbers (date+time / number of issues) in the current path.

Caching

Some of the values retrieved from repositories are cached - specifically issues, prs, issue-life, pr-life and stars. The caches are written as json files into the directory .ghrepo-stats in the home directory of the current user. Especially for repositories with many issues this decreases the time needed to get the data dramatically, if called a second time for the same repository.

Examples

Get some measure of popularity change by showing the number of stargazers over time (note: stars that have been retracted are not counted):

$ show-ghstats stars "jmcgeheeiv/pyfakefs"

Check how issues are handled over time. There are two possibilities:

• Show the number of open issues at any point in time:

$ show-ghstats issues "vvvv/svg"

• Show the average lifetime of an issue as it changes over time. An increasing curve means ever more unresolved issues (also depends on the policies of the specific project - some projects leave issues open indefinitely, while others close outdated issues):

$ show-ghstats issue-life "jmcgeheeiv/pyfakefs"

Get some measure of activity by checking how the code size changed over time (measured in code additions/deletions):

$ show-ghstats codesize "pytest-dev/pytest"