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Choosing libraries

With most projects you are likely to want to use publicly-available libraries and that usually means searching for them on GitHub. In most cases, there will be several to choose from. Here are some things to look for on a GitHub repo when selecting a library.

How many stars?

More stars usually means more people are interested in a repo and have thought about using at some time. However, not everyone is diligent in unstarring a starred repo, so this might bias you towards selecting not the best, but the most-established repo.

How many watchers?

Watchers of a repo get pestered whenever there are any discussions on issues, so these tend to be a better indicator of actively-interested users.

How many and how recent are the commits?

Lots of recent commits from several different users is usually a good sign of an actively-maintained library.

Issue activity

Things to look for are how many open vs closed issues; how swift are the responses by the maintainers to issues raised by users; and how well-labelled are the issues. All these indicate that the maintainers are active, responsive to the community and well-organised.

Contributor activity

The shape of the contributions graph and individual contributions tells you a lot about the health of the developer community over time.

The README

A well-written README with easy-to-follow usage examples is always a good sign.

libraries.io

Andrew nesbitt has created a fantastic resource called Libraries.io, that makes it easier to decide on which library to use, by condensing the research tasks above into a single search.

References