Comparing OSS on GitHub

You are making a decision on which open source project you would adopt for your newly developing application.

This time it is a little bit difficult for you because the candidates are seemingly almost the same in a functional perspective.

So let's delve into this from a different perspective: contributors and users activities.

• More stars, forks, and watchers are the good vital sign of a vibrant project, which indicates many users getting involved with the project.
• More issues stand for both good and bad sign but basically it indicates their activeness.
• Organization owned projects are, in most cases, more stable and robust than user owned projects.
• Size of the repository have complexed meanings but in practice, simpler code is better than the massive one if both are trying to achieve the same goal.

I made a simple tool to get you covered with the above guidelines.

compare-github

compare-github is a simple terminal app to explore your candidates and aggregate a result into a nice-looking report.

npx @compare/github facebook/react vuejs/vue riot/riot

or using yarn:

yarn global add @compare/github
compare-github facebook/react vuejs/vue riot/riot

You will see the GitHub activities for each candidate at once.
It could help you to decide which library you would adopt!

Warmly welcome to any comments/ideas to improve compare-github!

Comments

[rhymes]

Hi Uechi, seems very neat tool to gather statistics on repositories, well done!

just a few things:

• if you just call gh-compare or gh-compare --help you get this:

✖ Something went wrong: TypeError: Cannot convert undefined or null to object
✖ Generating comparison

• if you call with just one repository you get this:

ℹ Compared to 1 repositories
┌──────────┬────────────────┐
│ fullname │ facebook/react │
├──────────┼────────────────┤
│ language │ JavaScript     │
├──────────┼────────────────┤
│ created  │ over 5 years   │
├──────────┼────────────────┤
│ updated  │ about 10 hours │
├──────────┼────────────────┤
│ stars    │ 110205         │
├──────────┼────────────────┤
│ watches  │ 6283           │
├──────────┼────────────────┤
│ forks    │ 19659          │
├──────────┼────────────────┤
│ issues   │ 349            │
├──────────┼────────────────┤
│ size     │ 134.66MB       │
├──────────┼────────────────┤
│ owner    │ Organization   │
└──────────┴────────────────┘
✔ Generating comparison

1 repositories should probably be 1 repository

• if you call it with duplicates, it lists the duplicates twice:

ℹ Compared to 3 repositories
┌──────────┬────────────────┬─────────────────┬─────────────────┐
│ fullname │ facebook/react │ angular/angular │ angular/angular │
├──────────┼────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┤
│ language │ JavaScript     │ TypeScript      │ TypeScript      │
├──────────┼────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┤
│ created  │ over 5 years   │ almost 4 years  │ almost 4 years  │
├──────────┼────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┤
│ updated  │ about 10 hours │ about 17 hours  │ about 17 hours  │
├──────────┼────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┤
│ stars    │ 110205         │ 40163           │ 40163           │
├──────────┼────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┤
│ watches  │ 6283           │ 3193            │ 3193            │
├──────────┼────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┤
│ forks    │ 19659          │ 9808            │ 9808            │
├──────────┼────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┤
│ issues   │ 349            │ 2470            │ 2470            │
├──────────┼────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┤
│ size     │ 134.66MB       │ 83.52MB         │ 83.52MB         │
├──────────┼────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┤
│ owner    │ Organization   │ Organization    │ Organization    │
└──────────┴────────────────┴─────────────────┴─────────────────┘
✔ Generating comparison

maybe you want to deduplicate so to have only 2 repos, not 3

• finally, if one of the repos doesn't exist the tool breaks, like gh-compare facebook/react angular/anguasd:

✖ Something went wrong: TypeError: Cannot read property 'type' of undefined
✖ Generating comparison

Hope this is helpful!

[uetchy]

Thank you for the thoughtful feedback! It helped me so much :)
I've just updated gh-compare to cover these issues.

You can update gh-compare via npm install -g gh-compare@1.1.0.

[rhymes]

ahahha that was quick :-D

well done!