Lean GHTorrent : GitHub data on demand

G. Gousios, B.N. Vasilescu, A. Serebrenik, A. Zaidman

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

    106 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    In recent years, GitHub has become the largest code host in the world, with more than 5M developers collaborating across 10M repositories. Numerous popular open source projects (such as Ruby on Rails, Homebrew, Bootstrap, Django or jQuery) have chosen GitHub as their host and have migrated their code base to it. GitHub offers a tremendous research potential. For instance, it is a flagship for current open source development, a place for developers to showcase their expertise to peers or potential recruiters, and the platform where social coding features or pull requests emerged. However, GitHub data is, to date, largely underexplored. To facilitate studies of GitHub, we have created GHTorrent, a scalable, queriable, offline mirror of the data offered through the GitHub REST API. In this paper we present a novel feature of GHTorrent designed to offer customisable data dumps on demand. The new GHTorrent data-on-demand service offers users the possibility to request via a web form up-to-date GHTorrent data dumps for any collection of GitHub repositories. We hope that by offering customisable GHTorrent data dumps we will not only lower the "barrier for entry" even further for researchers interested in mining GitHub data (thus encourage researchers to intensify their mining efforts), but also enhance the replicability of GitHub studies (since a snapshot of the data on which the results were obtained can now easily accompany each study).
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publication11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR '14, Hyderabad, India, May 31-June 1, 2014)
    Place of PublicationNew York NY
    PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
    Pages384-387
    ISBN (Print)978-1-4503-2863-0
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2014
    Event11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2014) - Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC), Hyderabad, India
    Duration: 31 May 20141 Jun 2014
    Conference number: 11
    http://2014.msrconf.org/

    Conference

    Conference11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2014)
    Abbreviated titleMSR 2014
    Country/TerritoryIndia
    CityHyderabad
    Period31/05/141/06/14
    OtherConference co-located with the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2014)
    Internet address

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