ghcontribs

Generate information about all GitHub contributions for a given user.

This was developed out of a desire to create a more detailed view of my own contributions to open-source software, including tracking where I've contributed PRs and where I've contributed bug report issues.

The requirements I had were:

• Get a list of Issues I've opened
• Get a list of Pull Requests I've opened

The goal was to gather data that could be presented as, e.g., a web page to gives more information about my contributions, and perhaps allows me to highlight a few aspects. This library allows you to store all your contributions in a JSON file, and reload them to generate whatever output you would like.

This library uses the GitHub GraphQL API (v4), with the thought that this might be better future-proofed than the REST API (v3). Tested Python versions follow NEP29.

Installing

ghcontribs is distributed on PyPI, and can be installed through standard approaches using pip or setuptools. Recommended installation via pip:

python -m pip install ghcontribs

Contributing

Contributions are most welcome. This was just written for my own needs; I hope it is easy for other to extend it to meet their needs, too!

Related work

I didn't find any existing tools that seemed to meet my goals (at least, not as Python libraries), so I wrote my own. However, here are a few related tools that I did find:

Very similar functionality

• show-me: This has very similar functionality to what I have here, and may be better for many users. I didn't find show-me until I'd already created ghcontribs. It has slightly different ways of handling cached data, and I think the information I store from the GraphQL query is a little more useful for my interests.

Tools that only get the contribution graph

The contribution graph is a great way of illustrating a user's contributions over a period of time, and filling those green squares is one of the things that keeps me motivated as an open-source developer. However, it doesn't give an easy way to provide an overview of how that user's contributions are split by repository or organization.

• github-contributions: Uses web scraping to get the graph (not a guaranteed stable API); hasn't been updated since 2016 (as of late 2021).

Tools focused on per-repository contributions

For projects, especially large projects, it can be very useful to see where the contributions to a specific repository come from. This is sort of a flip side to my interest here, which is to look at a specific user's contributions to all repositories.

• git-fame: Tool for listing contributions to a given repository; in many ways an improved version of git blame for counting contribution history. Very useful (my go-to for estimating per-user code contributions to a given repo), but tracks code contributions (commits) only, not GitHub contributions such as issues/pull requests.
• octohatrack: Obtain detailed contribution reports for a given repository. Whereas git-fame is great for commits, octohatrack is great GitHub-specific contributions like issues and reviews.

Tools focused on per-repository graph generation

These tools seem primarily focused on generating graphs from the GitHub data.

• contrib
• hercules / labours