GitHub Stats Visualization

Generate visualizations of GitHub user and repository statistics with GitHub Actions. Visualizations can include data from private repositories, and from repositories you have contributed to, but do not own.

Generated images automatically switch between GitHub light theme and GitHub dark theme.

Background

When someone views a GitHub profile, it is often because they are curious about the user's open-source 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. It also dumps all statistics to a JSON file that can be used for further data analysis.

Since this 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

The GitHub statistics API returns inaccurate results in some situations:

• Total lines of code modified may be inflated – GitHub counts changes to files like package-lock.json that may impact the line count in surprising ways
  • On the other hand, GitHub refuses to count lines of code for repositories with more than 10,000 commits, so contributions to those will not be reflected in the data at all
  • The GitHub API endpoint for computing contributor statistics no longer works reliably, so we compute the statistics ourselves by cloning each repository locally and tallying lines changed with the git CLI
    • Our computed totals likely under-count relative to GitHub's, since theirs correctly attribute authorship for contributions to pull requests with several authors that end up squashed and merged by just one author
• Repository view count statistics often seem too low, and many referring sites are not captured
  • If you lack permissions to access the view count for a repository, it will be tallied as zero views – this is common for external repositories where your only contribution is making a pull request
• Only repositories with commit contributions are counted, so if you only open an issue on a repo, it will not show up in the statistics
  • Repos you created and own may not be counted if you never commit to them, or if the committer email is not connected to your GitHub account

If the calculated numbers seem strange, run the CLI locally and dump JSON output to determine which repositories are skewing the statistics in unexpected ways. See below for tips.

Installation

To make your own statistics images: make a copy of this repository, make a GitHub API token, add the token to the repository, run the Actions workflow, and retrieve the images.

1. Make a "classic" personal access token with read:user, user:email, and repo permissions.
   1. Navigate to the personal access tokens (classic) page. Open that link in a new tab, or proceed with the steps below.
      1. Click your avatar in the top right corner, then "Settings" on the menu that drops down.
      2. Click "Developer settings" from the menu on the left.
      3. Click "Personal access tokens", then "Tokens (classic)" from the menu on the left.
   2. Click "Generate new token" in the top right, then "Generate new token (classic)" in the menu that drops down.
   3. Set the expiration date to "none" (unless you want to periodically regenerate this token).
   4. Check read:user, user:email, and repo permissions.
      • read:user and repo permissions are necessary for reading user and repository metadata to calculate statistics.
      • user:email permission is necessary for correctly attributing commits to the user when cloning repositories locally to compute lines of code changed.
   5. Click the green "Generate token" button at the bottom.
   6. Copy the token and save it somewhere. If you lose it, you will not be able to access it again, and will have to regenerate a new one. I keep mine saved along with the GitHub entry in my password manager.
   7. Some users report that it can take some time for the personal access token to take effect. For more information, see #30.
2. Create a copy of this repository by clicking here.
   • Equivalently, click the big, green "Use this template" button at the top left of the page, then click "Create a new repository."
   • Note: this is not the same as forking a copy because it copies everything fresh, without the huge commit history.
3. Create a new repository secret named ACCESS_TOKEN with your personal access token from the first step.
   1. Go to the "New secret" page for your copy of this repository by clicking this link.
      • If the link doesn't work, try clicking it from your copy of this repository.
      • Alternatively, go to the page manually.
        1. Click "Settings" for your copy of this repository.
        2. Click "Secrets and variables" on the left, then "Actions" from the menu that drops down.
        3. Click the green "New repository secret" button on the "Actions secrets and variables" page.
   2. Name your secret ACCESS_TOKEN.
   3. Paste your personal access token from step 1 into the large "Secret" text box.
4. (Optional) Make other secrets for more configuration.
   • To exclude some repositories from the aggregate statistics, add them (separated by commas) to a secret called EXCLUDE_REPOS.
   • To exclude some languages from the aggregate statistics, add them (separated by commas) to a secret called EXCLUDE_LANGS.
   • Lists for EXCLUDE_REPOS and EXCLUDE_LANGS can use globbing patterns. For example, to exclude all repos by "@jstrieb", add jstrieb/* to EXCLUDE_REPOS.
   • These can also be set directly in the Actions workflow, but you should set them as secrets if you want to keep the repository names or languages private.
   • Other configuration options can be set as environment variables or command line arguments by directly editing the Actions workflow.
5. Go to the Actions page and click "Run Workflow" on the right side of the screen to generate images for the first time.
   • They automatically regenerate every 24 hours, but they can be manually regenerated by running the workflow this way.
6. Take a look at the images that have been created on the generated branch.
   • The overview.svg file.
   • The languages.svg file.
7. To add the statistics to your GitHub profile README, copy and paste the following lines of code into your markdown content.
   • Replace [USERNAME] in the links below with your own username.

   ![](https://github.com/[USERNAME]/github-stats/blob/generated/overview.svg#gh-dark-mode-only)
   ![](https://github.com/[USERNAME]/github-stats/blob/generated/overview.svg#gh-light-mode-only)
   ![](https://github.com/[USERNAME]/github-stats/blob/generated/languages.svg#gh-dark-mode-only)
   ![](https://github.com/[USERNAME]/github-stats/blob/generated/languages.svg#gh-light-mode-only)
   [Created by `jstrieb/github-stats`.](https://github.com/jstrieb/github-stats)

8. Star this repo if you like it!

Analyzing the Data

Using the github-stats CLI (available on the releases page) to run locally, you can dump raw statistics data to a JSON file using the --json-output-file command-line argument. Then, you can import the JSON file into your programming language of choice and start analyzing.

My preference is to use jq from the command line. The command-line examples below assume the JSON file is stored in stats.json.

List all

List all repositories, sorted with most-viewed at the bottom.

jq '.repositories | sort_by(.views) | del(.[].languages)' stats.json

In that command, replace .views with any other field name (such as .lines_changed or .stars) to sort by that field instead. The command removes the languages field (using del()) because it can clutter the output, making it hard to read.

Support the Project

If this project is useful to you, please support it!

• Star the repository (and follow me on GitHub for more)
• Share and upvote on sites like Twitter, Reddit, and Hacker News
• Report any bugs, glitches, or errors that you find
• Check out my other projects

These things motivate me to keep sharing what I build, and they provide validation that my work is appreciated! They also help me improve the project. Thanks in advance!

If you are insistent on spending money to show your support, I encourage you to instead make a generous donation to one of the following organizations.

• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Signal Foundation
• Mozilla
• The Internet Archive

Project Status

This project is actively maintained, but not actively developed. In other words, I will fix bugs, but will rarely add features (if at all). If there are no recent commits, it means that everything has been running smoothly!

GitHub's APIs often have unexpected errors, downtime, and strange, intermittent, undocumented behavior. Issues generating statistics images often resolve themselves within a day or two, without any changes to this code or repository.

If you want to contribute to the project, please open an issue and discuss first. Pull requests that are not discussed with me ahead of time may be ignored. It's nothing personal, I'm just busy, and reviewing others' code is nowhere near as fun as working on other projects.

Even if something were to happen to me, and I could not continue to work on the project, it will continue to work as long as the GitHub API endpoints it uses remain active and unchanged.

Related Projects

• Inspired by a desire to improve upon anuraghazra/github-readme-stats
• Uses GitHub Octicons to precisely match the GitHub UI