meteoritt / github-stats

Automatically generate summary GitHub statistics images for your profile using Actions, no server required

GitHub Stats Visualization

Generate visualizations of GitHub user and repository statistics using GitHub Actions for topalias repository: https://github.com/CSRedRat/topalias

This project is currently a work-in-progress; there will always be more interesting stats to display.

Background

When someone views a profile on GitHub, it is often because they are curious about a user's open source projects and contributions. Unfortunately, that user's stars, forks, and pinned repositories do not necessarily reflect the contributions they make to private repositories. The data likewise does not present a complete picture of the user's total contributions beyond the current year.

This project aims to collect a variety of profile and repository statistics using the GitHub API. It then generates images that can be displayed in repository READMEs, or in a user's Profile README.

Since the project runs on GitHub Actions, no server is required to regularly regenerate the images with updated statistics. Likewise, since the user runs the analysis code themselves via GitHub Actions, they can use their GitHub access token to collect statistics on private repositories that an external service would be unable to access.

Disclaimer

If the project is used with an access token that has sufficient permissions to read private repositories, it may leak details about those repositories in error messages. For example, the aiohttp library—used for asynchronous API requests—may include the requested URL in exceptions, which can leak the name of private repositories. If there is an exception caused by aiohttp, this exception will be viewable in the Actions tab of the repository fork, and anyone may be able to see the name of one or more private repositories.

Due to some issues with the GitHub statistics API, there are some situations where it returns inaccurate results. Specifically, the repository view count statistics and total lines of code modified are probably somewhat inaccurate. Unexpectedly, these values will become more accurate over time as GitHub caches statistics for your repositories. For more information, see issue #2 and #3.

Installation

1. Create a personal access token (not the default GitHub Actions token) using the instructions here. Personal access token must have permissions: read:user and repo. Copy the access token when it is generated – if you lose it, you will have to regenerate the token.
2. Fork the repository.
3. Go to the "Settings" tab of the fork and go to the "Secrets" page (bottom left). Create a new secret with the name ACCESS_TOKEN and paste the copied personal access token as the value.
4. Go to the "Actions" tab of the fork and hit the big green button to enable Actions.
5. If you want to ignore certain repos, add them (separated by commas) to a new secret—created as before—called EXCLUDED.
6. Commit a small change to the repo (for example remove a newline from the end of the README) to force it to regenerate the stats images. The first time that it generates the stats images, it may take a very long time. It does not generally take as long as the first time when it runs in the future.
7. Check out the images that have been created in the generated folder.
8. Link back to this repository so that others can generate their own statistics images.
9. Star this repo if you like it!

Related Projects

• Inspired by a desire to improve upon anuraghazra/github-readme-stats
• Makes use of GitHub Octicons to precisely match the GitHub UI
• Topalias: GitHub && GitLab