Github Contribution Dashboard

Dashboard to monitor the health of github projects based on their contribution statistics.

• Aggregates usage data across multiple repos from the Github API
• Widgets support aggregate statistics of multiple repos or even all repos within an organization.
• A leaderboard aggregates a score for the last 30 days on each contributor.
• Contributor scores based on activity in commits as well as in comments and pull requests.
• Travis CI build status across multiple branches
• Scrutinizer CI code quality metrics
• Trend projections for current month on issues opened, issues closed and pull requests
• Quick integration of other data sources through a common widget framework
• Easy hosting through Heroku

All visualizations are optimized to encourage direct action by individuals, so prefers short-term trends and relative measures over long-term data. For example, the leaderboard only inspects the last 30 days of contributions, allowing new contributors to get to the top more easily.

Preview: The SilverStripe CMS project, aggregating over 50 repositories that the project either maintains or actively contributes to. View it live at github-dashing.silverstripe.com.

Preview: Leaderboard with detailed scoring (on hover)

Preview: Pull request stats with trend projection for current month

Preview: Travis build status with per-branch status and code quality indicators

The dashboard is based on Dashing, a Ruby web application built on the Sinatra framework. It uses the Github API rather than githubarchive.org data dumps because of the immediate nature of dashboard update (refreshes every hour by default). The code used to be based on Google BigQuery aggregation, but this turned out to be infeasible due to query size and BigQuery pricing.

Setup

Generic Configuration

First install the required dependencies through bundle install.

The project is configured through environment variables. Copy the .env.sample configuration file to .env. All configuration is optional, apart from either ORGAS or REPOS.

• ORGAS: Github organizations. Separate multiple by comma. Will use all repos for an organization. Example: silverstripe,silverstripe-labs.
• REPOS: Github repository identifiers. Separate multiple by comma. If used alongside ORGAS, the logic will add all mentioned repos to the ones retrieved from ORGAS. Example: silverstripe/silverstripe-framework,silverstripe/silverstripe-cms
• SINCE: Date string, or relative time parsed through http://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_support_core_extensions.html. Example: 12.months.ago.beginning_of_month, 2012-01-01
• GITHUB_LOGIN: Github authentication is optional, but recommended
• GITHUB_OAUTH_TOKEN: See above
• LEADERBOARD_WEIGHTING: Comma-separated weighting pairs influencing the multiplication of values used for the leaderboard widget score. Example: commits_additions_max=200,commits_additions_loc_threshold=1000,commits_deletions_max=100,commits_deletions_loc_threshold=1000
• LEADERBOARD_EDITS_WEIGHTING: Comma-separated weighting pairs influencing the leaderboard widget scores based on lines of code added and deleted. The max and threshold values ensure the scores stay in reasonable bounds, and don't bias massive edits or additions of third party libraries to the codebase over other metrics. Note that the metrics are collected from the "default branch" in Github only. Example: issues_opened=5,issues_closed=5,pull_requests_opened=10,pull_requests_closed=5,pull_request_comments=1,issue_comments=1,commit_comments=1,commits=20
• LEADERBOARD_SKIP_ORGA_MEMBERS: Exclude organization members from leaderboard. Useful to track "external" contributions. Comma-separated list oforganization names.
• TRAVIS_BRANCH_BLACKLIST: A blacklist of branches ignored by repo, as a JSON string. This is useful to ignore old branches which no longer have active builds. Example: {"silverstripe-labs/silverstripe-newsletter":["0.3","0.4"]}

You can also specify a custom env file through setting a DOTENV_FILE environment variable first. This is useful if you want to have version controlled defaults (see .env.silverstripe).

Custom Configuration

The dashboard is used by the SilverStripe CMS project, some of the functionality is specific to this use case. Simply leave out the configuration values in case you're use case is different.

• FORUM_STATS_URL: Absolute URL returning JSON data for forum statistics such as "unanswered posts"

Github API Access

The dashboard uses the public github API, which doesn't require authentication. Depending on how many repositories you're showing, hundreds of API calls might be necessary, which can quickly exhaust the API limitations for unauthenticated use.

In order to authenticate, create a new API Access Token on your github.com account, and add it to the .env configuration:

GITHUB_LOGIN=your_login
GITHUB_OAUTH_TOKEN=2b0ff00...................

The dashboard uses the official Github API client for Ruby (Octokit), and respects HTTP cache headers where appropriate to avoid making unnecessary API calls.

Usage

Finally, start the dashboard server:

dashing start

Now you can browse the dashboard at http://localhost:3030/default.

Tasks

The Dashing jobs query for their data whenever the server is started, and then with a frequency of 1h by default.

Heroku Deployment

Since Dashing is simply a Sinatra Rack app under the hood, deploying is a breeze. It takes around 30 seconds to do :)

First, sign up for the free service. Download the dev tools and install them with your account credentials.

Due to a bug in config pushing on Heroku, its important to leave all single-line values in .env unquoted.

Now you're ready to add your app to Heroku:

# Create a git repo for your project, and add your files.
git init
git add .
git commit -m "My beautiful dashboard"

# Create the application on Heroku 
heroku apps:create myapp

# Push the application to Heroku
git push heroku master

# Push your `.env` configuration
heroku plugins:install git://github.com/ddollar/heroku-config.git
heroku config:push

Logging through Sentry

The project has optional Sentry integration for logging exceptions. Its particularly useful to capture Github API errors, e.g. when a project has been renamed. To use it, configure your SENTRY_DSN in .env (docs). You'll need to sign up to Sentry to receive a valid DSN.

Contributing

Pull requests are very welcome! Please make sure that the code you're fixing is actually part of this project, and not just generated from the upstream Dashing library templates.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to SilverStripe Ltd. for sponsoring the Heroku hosting and the physical dashboard at the SilverStripe offices in Wellington, New Zealand.

License

Distributed under the MIT license