A reference implementation to list all InnerSource projects of a company in an interactive and easy to use way. It can be used as a template for implementing the InnerSource portal pattern by the InnerSource Commons community.
A running instance of the portal using mock data can be found here.
The portal can also be seen in action at the InnerSourceCommons Fall Summit 2020 session The Unexpected Path of Applying InnerSource Patterns.
Each tile in the project portal represents an InnerSource project. The list of projects can be filtered by programming language, sorted by various KPIs, and searched using a keyword. Filter and search criterias are persisted in the URL to allow sharing a subset of projects easily. Entries in the portal can be sorted by the Repository Activity Score.
Clicking on the repository URL or the contribute button will take you directly to the source repository for GitHub projects. Clicking on any other area on the tile will open the details popup with more information on the project.
The "+" button in the lower right will explain how to list new projects and how to create the InnerSource metadata file that contains additional information about the project.
Install nodejs.
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Fork and clone this repository
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Install nodejs dependencies
npm installNote: a
postinstallscript will place all required framework libraries in thelibfolder
- Run the project portal on a local web server
npm startNote: a browser window will open automatically
- Start developing!
The portal uses a static repos.json file with mock data for testing and developing purposes. In a productive environment, consider adding an automated crawler script that fetches all InnerSource projects as outlined in the following picture:
To do so, apply the following steps:
-
Crawl all projects with the topic
inner-sourcein your GitHub instance using the GitHub search API:?q=topic:inner-sourceThe API returns a list of projects with essential information like name, avatar, description, and statistics that we can enrich with additional fields.
Note: You can optionally limit the result set by adding
is:publicoris:privateto the query, depending on how InnerSource repositories are characterized in your environment. -
For each resulting project add a key
_InnerSourceMetadatato the result from the GitHub API call and fill it with additional metadata about the project:-
Check if there is a file
innersource.jsonin the repository and add all keys directly below_InnerSourceMetadata. -
Query GitHub for the weekly commit count (subset "all") and add it with the key
participation -
(Optional) Check if there are contribution guidelines and add the file name with the key
guidelines(e.g.CONTRIBUTING.md). If specified, the Contribute button will link directly to the file instead of the repository root. -
(Optional) Query GitHub topics and add the array of topics with the key
topicsfor each repo to allow searching projects by topic and displaying them on the detail popup. -
(Optional) Calculate the Repository Activity Score to define a meaningful order for the projects. Sort entries by score descending. Add it with the key
score
-
-
Write the resulting list of projects with all metadata to the file
repos.jsonto serve all projects in the portal.
With this approach, projects can self-register to the portal by adding the inner-source topic to their repository and specifying additional metadata inside an innersource.json file.
For more information about this file, see Listing Project in the Project Portal for InnerSource
The portal focuses on InnerSource projects located in one or more GitHub enterprise instances. Projects using other source code management systems can be displayed in the portal using similar APIs or by adding them manually to the repos.json file.
This project started as an InnerSource project at SAP and is now open source. Your contributions are welcome! Please check our contributing guidelines for more details.
We use the following open source frameworks to create the portal:
Thanks to InnerSourceCommons Pattern Group for the feedback and great support.


