ghstars

Motivation

Developers love GitHub. Even more so, they love seeing the stars of their repos rise. This is evident in the popularity of website’s such star-history.t9t.io which created plots like this one.

Having a website to create these kind of plots in great but I thought it would be even better to have an R package to do so. That’s why I created {ghstars}.

Overview

get_repo_star_history() is the work horse of {ghstars}. It fetches the star history of any GitHub repository via the GitHub API thanks to the {gh} package. Its associated plot method creates a stunning visualization of the star history.

library(ghstars)
star_history <- get_repo_star_history("thomas-neitmann/ggcharts")
head(star_history)

##                       repo       date day stars cumulative_stars
## 1 thomas-neitmann/ggcharts 2020-01-07   0     1                1
## 2 thomas-neitmann/ggcharts 2020-01-14   7     1                2
## 3 thomas-neitmann/ggcharts 2020-01-28  21     1                3
## 4 thomas-neitmann/ggcharts 2020-02-01  25     1                4
## 5 thomas-neitmann/ggcharts 2020-02-02  26     1                5
## 6 thomas-neitmann/ggcharts 2020-02-03  27     2                7

plot(star_history)

get_pkg_star_history() is a shortcut for retrieving the star history of R packages. It allows you to pass just the package name instead of the whole repo name as its argument. The function searches for the GitHub repo of the package. If it is successful it calls get_repo_star_history(). If not, an error is thrown.

star_histories <- get_pkg_star_history(c("Rcpp", "scales"))
plot(star_histories)

Installation

The package is currently only available from GitHub.

if (!"remotes" %in% installed.packages()) {
  install.packages("remotes")
}
remotes::install_github("thomas-neitmann/ghstars", upgrade = "never")

If you get an error when trying to install, run this code and then try to install once again.

Sys.setenv(R_REMOTES_NO_ERRORS_FROM_WARNINGS = "true")

If the installation still fails please open an issue.