github-repo-stats

What This Skill Does

The github-repo-stats skill is an essential utility for developers, project managers, and researchers who need to quickly assess the popularity and scale of open-source projects. By leveraging the GitHub REST API and local repository analysis tools like cloc, this skill provides automated insights into any public GitHub repository. It specifically retrieves the current star count—a key metric for community interest and social proof—and performs a shallow clone of the repository to calculate the exact lines of code (LOC), offering a clearer picture of the project's complexity and depth.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, use the OpenClaw command-line interface. Ensure you have cloc installed on your system path, as it is a mandatory dependency for calculating the code line statistics. Execute the following command in your terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/chenpinji/github-repo-stats

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for scenarios such as:

• Technical Due Diligence: Evaluating whether a library is mature enough to be integrated into a commercial product based on community support and codebase size.
• Benchmarking: Comparing multiple tools or frameworks to understand which one is more robust or actively maintained.
• Researcher Reporting: Quickly gathering data for academic papers or blog posts regarding trending software development patterns.
• Learning Path Validation: Determining the difficulty of a codebase before contributing to a new open-source project.

Example Prompts

1. "Check the current star count and total lines of code for the vllm-project/vllm repository."
2. "How popular is the Facebook React repo, and how large is its codebase in terms of lines of code?"
3. "Could you fetch the stats for openai/whisper and summarize how much code is currently in the repo?"

Tips & Limitations

• Rate Limiting: The GitHub REST API has rate limits for unauthenticated requests. If you encounter errors, ensure your network environment allows access to api.github.com.
• Disk Space: Since this skill clones repositories to a temporary directory (/tmp), ensure you have sufficient disk space when analyzing massive monolithic repositories.
• Accuracy: The lines of code are calculated using the cloc tool, which counts physical lines of code, excluding comments and blank lines by default. Note that some repositories may contain auto-generated files or large assets that might skew the results.
• Privacy: This skill only interacts with public repositories. Private repositories are not supported due to access restrictions and security considerations.