hits

What if there was a simple+easy way to see how many people have viewed your GitHub Repository?

Why?

We have a few repos on GitHub ... but sadly, we have no idea how many people are looking at the repos unless they star/watch them; GitHub does not share any stats with people using their site.

We would like to know the popularity of each of our repos to know where we need to be investing our time.

What?

A simple way to add (very basic) analytics to your GitHub repos.

There are already many "Badges" available which people put in their repos: https://github.com/dwyl/repo-badges But we haven't seen one that gives a "hit counter" of the number of times a page has been viewed ...

How?

Place a badge (image) in your repo README.md so others can can see how popular the page is and you can track it.

Implementation

What is the minimum possible amount of data we can store?

• date+time the person visited the site. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date/now
• user-agent the browser or crawler visiting the page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent
• referer url of the page where the image is requested from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer

Log entries are stored as a String which can be parsed and re-formatted into any other format:

1436570536950 x7uapo9 84.91.136.21

| Timestamp | User Agent | IP Address | | ------------- |:------------|:------------:| | 1436570536950 | x7uapo9 | 84.91.136.21 |

We then have a user-agent hash where we can lookup the by id:

{
  "x7uapo9":"Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10",
  "N03v1lz":"Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
}

Fetch SVG from shields.io and serve it just-in-time

Given that shields.io has a badge creation service, and it has acceptable latency, we are proxying the their service.

Research

User Agents

How many user agents (web browsers + crawlers) are there? there appear to be fewer than a couple of thousand user agents. http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/useragentstring.php which means we could store them using a numeric index; 1 - 3000

But, storing the user agents using a numeric index means we need to perform a lookup on each hit which requires network IO ... (expensive!) What if there was a way of deriving a String representation of the the user-agent string ... oh, that's right, here's one I made earlier... https://github.com/ideaq/aguid

Log Formats

• Apache Log Sample: http://www.monitorware.com/en/logsamples/apache.php

Node.js http module headers

https://nodejs.org/api/http.html#http_message_rawheaders