repon

repon is a CLI tool that finds the top-n GitHub repositories for an organization by a metric.

Supported metrics are:

• Top-n repositories by stars.
• Top-n repositories by forks.
• Top-n repositories by pull requests.
• Top-n repositories by contribution percentage (PRs/forks).

Getting started

1. go install -i github.com/vtsao/repon
2. Authentication is required via a GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT) with repo scope.
3. repon --pat=[YOUR_PAT] --org=netflix --n=5 --metric=prs

Sample output:

$ repon --pat=[REDACTED] --org=netflix --n=5 --metric=prs
2020/12/20 22:59:43 Using GitHub GraphQL API
Listing top 5 repos for org "netflix" by "prs"...
1) repo: "lemur", pull requests: 2812
2) repo: "atlas", pull requests: 1037
3) repo: "titus-control-plane", pull requests: 956
4) repo: "conductor", pull requests: 906
5) repo: "genie", pull requests: 889
Took 5.1702134s

GitHub GraphQL API vs. GitHub REST API

repon supports using both the GitHub GraphQL API and GitHub REST API. The GraphQL API is used by default. You can specify using the REST API via --use_graphql=false.

Implementation using GraphQL API

Top-n repositories are listed with the GraphQL by performing a Search query to retrieve all repositories for the organization. The returned Repository object contains totals for stars, forks, and pull requests. Then sorting is done locally and the top-n is returned.

The GraphQL API is preferred over the REST API because all the information for each repository can be returned in a single API call to calculate the top-n repositories for a metric.

Implementation using REST API

When using the REST API, we use the Search repositories method to retrieve all repositories for an organization. When using the stars or forks metric, we optimize by having the Search method sort for us and we return early when paging through the Search results if we've reached n repositories.

When using prs or contribs we need to manually join this information for each repository we retrieve via Search because the Search results do not contain pull request information. Then we need to sort all the repositories locally to return the top-n.

Filling in PR information for a repository is done with the List pull requests method. In order to avoid paging through all the PRs to find the total, we do a single list with a per_page of 1, since the pagination results tell us how many pages there are in total. Because we have to query for total PRs for each repository, we allow concurrency via --fill_prs_concurrency. This should be set to a small number, otherwise you will trigger GitHub's Abuse rate limits.

NOTE: finding the total PRs for a repository could have also been done using the Search issues and pull requests method, but Search has a significantly lower rate limit allowance than the core API, which becomes a problem for larger organizations containing many repositories.

Tests

Both repoql and repo have functional tests against a simplified fake GitHub GraphQL API and GitHub REST API, respectively. The tests use httptest to spin up a local HTTP server to exercise real network transports.