Published an OSS Repository That Continuously Stores GitHub Repository Metrics Using GAS

Hey Devs!

Previously, I explored how we can monitor OSS activity metrics based on GitHub repository data.

Building on that, I implemented a Google Apps Script (GAS) that continuously stores traffic data from GitHub repositories.

This time, while adding GAS functions to store other metrics, I have published the repository as OSS. I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce it once again.

Published Repository

The published repository is available here.

The initial setup is summarized in the README. I will focus mainly on why I decided to store these metrics.

Stored Metrics

1. Stargazers

Objectives

• To understand the daily increase in stars.

• To correlate the days with star increases with possible reasons or initiatives.

Issues

• On GitHub’s web UI, only the total number of stars and the accounts that starred are visible.

  • Example: https://github.com/giselles-ai/giselle/stargazers

• With Star History, the counts for nearby days are rounded off, and it does not allow for note-taking.

  • Example: https://www.star-history.com/#giselles-ai/giselle&Date

Solution

I implemented the function updateSheetWithStargazers to record who starred on which day.

The graph was created as shown below. The key is to enable “Aggregate” on the X-axis. Except for the colored cells, you can freely add notes.

2. Traffic views

Objectives

• To permanently store the numerical data from the Visitors graph in the repository’s Insights > Traffic section.

  • https://github.com/[ORG]/[REPO]/graphs/traffic

Issues

• The graph does not display data older than two weeks.

• The GitHub REST API Get traffic views has the same limitation.

Solution

I implemented the function updateSheetWithLatestTrafficViews that uses this API to store the daily Views and Unique visitors in a spreadsheet.

3. Traffic clones

Objectives

• To permanently store the numerical data from the Git clones graph in the repository’s Insights > Traffic section.

  • https://github.com/[ORG]/[REPO]/graphs/traffic

Issues

• The graph does not display data older than two weeks.

• The GitHub REST API Get traffic clones has the same limitation.

Solution

I implemented the function updateSheetWithLatestTrafficClones that uses this API to store the daily Clones and Unique cloners in a spreadsheet.

4. Top referral sources

Objectives

• To permanently store the numerical data from the Referring sites graph in the repository’s Insights > Traffic section.

  • https://github.com/[ORG]/[REPO]/graphs/traffic

Issues

• The graph does not display data older than two weeks.

• The GitHub REST API Get top referral sources has the same limitation.

• Each value is the total for the past 14 days, which is not very user-friendly.

Solution

I implemented the function updateSheetWithLatestTrafficReferrers using this API to store the daily Referring sites in a spreadsheet.

To create a stacked graph, I made a pivot table of Views and Unique visitors on a separate sheet, along with their respective graphs.

While the issue of each value being a total for the past 14 days remains unsolved, it seems possible to separate them using spreadsheet functions.

Conclusion

I have published the OSS repository https://github.com/route06inc/ospo-google-apps-script that continuously stores GitHub repository metrics using GAS.

This tool is already in daily use on the repositories of Giselle and Liam, and the data is being effectively utilized.

• https://github.com/giselles-ai/giselle

• https://github.com/liam-hq/liam