Sampling Projects in GitHub for MSR Studies

TL;DR

This paper introduces GHS, a comprehensive, continuously updated dataset of GitHub repositories with 25 characteristics, facilitating project sampling for MSR studies despite API limitations.

Contribution

The paper presents GHS, a large, queryable dataset of GitHub repositories with key features, addressing API limitations and supporting MSR research.

Findings

Contains data on 735,669 repositories across 10 languages.

Supports complex selection criteria for repository sampling.

Provides a web application for easy querying and data retrieval.

Abstract

Almost every Mining Software Repositories (MSR) study requires, as first step, the selection of the subject software repositories. These repositories are usually collected from hosting services like GitHub using specific selection criteria dictated by the study goal. For example, a study related to licensing might be interested in selecting projects explicitly declaring a license. Once the selection criteria have been defined, utilities such as the GitHub APIs can be used to "query" the hosting service. However, researchers have to deal with usage limitations imposed by these APIs and a lack of required information. For example, the GitHub search APIs allow 30 requests per minute and, when searching repositories, only provide limited information (e.g., the number of commits in a repository is not included). To support researchers in sampling projects from GitHub, we present GHS (GitHub Search), a dataset containing 25 characteristics (e.g., number of commits, license, etc.) of 735,669 repositories written in 10 programming languages. The set of characteristics has been derived by looking for frequently used project selection criteria in MSR studies and the dataset is continuously updated to (i) always provide fresh data about the existing projects, and (ii) increase the number of indexed projects. The GHS dataset can be queried through a web application we built that allows to set many combinations of selection criteria needed for a study and download the information of matching repositories: https://seart-ghs.si.usi.ch.