bt- / pv-foss-engagement

Engagement statistics tracker for PV FOSS projects

PV FOSS Engagement

This repository tracks and summarizes engagement statistics for several open-source software projects related to solar photovoltaics. See https://openpvtools.github.io/pv-foss-engagement/

The summaries are computed by jupyter notebooks which essentially act as webpage templates and are located at /sphinx/source/project. The results stored in the notebook files may be out of date, but because the notebooks are automatically re-run when building the website, the website itself will reflect the updated data as of the time of build.

The website is automatically rebuilt any time the main branch is updated, meaning the website will update by itself whenever new data is added to the repo or the notebooks are updated.

Currently, this project uses two sources of data:

GitHub stars/contributors

GitHub stars over time are retrieved from GitHub's "stargazers" API. For now, this project only summarizes the current dataset returned from that API. That means that it only summarizes the users currently starring the project; it has no concept of users that previously starred the project but later unstarred it. Contributor data is also retrieved, although "contributor" in this context refers only to commit authors, which is of course one of several types of project contributors.

ReadTheDocs page views

ReadTheDocs only reports data for roughly the last three months, so part of this project is to periodically fetch and archive the latest data so it doesn't get lost. Unfortunately the older data from before this project started is probably permanently gone.

Fetching

Unfortunately there is currently no way to access analytics data through the RTD API. Instead, we use a manual python scraper: scrape_readthedocs.py. This script is automatically run by GitHub Actions.

Archiving

Data files are stored in the /data directory. These files contain page view statistics for each day, RTD version, and URL path.