SourceCred

SourceCred creates reputation networks for open-source projects. Any open-source project can create its own cred, which is a reputational metric showing how much credit contributors deserve for helping the project. To compute cred, we organize a project’s contributions into a graph, whose edges connect contributions to each other and to contributors. We then run PageRank on that graph.

To learn more about SourceCred’s vision and values, please check out our website and our forum. One good forum post to start with is A Gentle Introduction to Cred.

For an example of SourceCred in action, you can see SourceCred’s own prototype cred attribution.

Current Status

We have a prototype that can generate a cred attribution based on GitHub interactions (issues, pull requests, comments, references, etc.). We’re working on adding more information to the prototype, such as tracking modifications to individual files, source-code analysis, GitHub reactions, and more.

Running the Prototype

If you’d like to try it out, you can run a local copy of SourceCred as follows. First, make sure that you have the following dependencies:

• Install Node (tested on v12.x.x and v10.x.x).
• Install Yarn (tested on v1.7.0).
• Create a GitHub API token. No special permissions are required.
• For macOS users: Ensure that your environment provides GNU coreutils. See this comment for details about what, how, and why.

Then, run the following commands to clone and build SourceCred:

git clone https://github.com/sourcecred/sourcecred.git
cd sourcecred
yarn install
yarn backend
export SOURCECRED_GITHUB_TOKEN=YOUR_GITHUB_TOKEN
node bin/sourcecred.js load REPO_OWNER/REPO_NAME

Loading a repo can take a few minutes. When it is finished, it will exit. Next, we can start sourcecred:

yarn start

Finally, we can navigate a browser window to localhost:8080 to view generated data.

Examples

If you wanted to look at cred for ipfs/js-ipfs, you could run:

export SOURCECRED_GITHUB_TOKEN=YOUR_GITHUB_TOKEN
node bin/sourcecred.js load ipfs/js-ipfs

You can also combine data from multiple repositories into a single graph. To do so, pass multiple repositories to the load command, and specify an “output name” for the repository. For instance, the invocation

node bin/sourcecred.js load ipfs/js-ipfs ipfs/go-ipfs --output ipfs/meta-ipfs

will create a graph called ipfs/meta-ipfs in the cred explorer, containing the combined contents of the js-ipfs and go-ipfs repositories.

Docker

The prototype may also be run using docker-compose. To build the container,

git clone https://github.com/sourcecred/sourcecred.git
cd sourcecred
docker-compose build

Arguments can now be passed to node bin/sourcecred.js load via:

docker-compose run --rm \
  -p 8080:8080 -e SOURCECRED_GITHUB_TOKEN=YOUR_GITHUB_TOKEN \
  sourcecred

For example,

docker-compose run --rm \
  -p 8080:8080 -e SOURCECRED_GITHUB_TOKEN=YOUR_GITHUB_TOKEN \
  sourcecred ipfs/js-ipfs ipfs/go-ipfs --output ipfs/meta-ipfs

Early Adopters

We’re looking for projects who want to be early adopters of SourceCred! If you’re a maintainer of an open-source project and would like to start using SourceCred, please reach out to us on our Discord or our forum.

Contributing

We’d love to accept your contributions! You can reach out to us by posting on our forum, or chatting with us on Discord. We'd be happy to help you get started and show you around the codebase. Please also take a look at our contributing guide.

If you’re looking for a place to start, we’ve tagged some good first issues.

License

SourceCred is dual-licensed under Apache 2.0 and MIT terms:

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT License (LICENSE-MIT or https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

Acknowledgements

We’d like to thank Protocol Labs for funding and support of SourceCred. We’d also like to thank the many open-source communities that produced the software that SourceCred is built on top of, such as Git and Node.