ghFollow - Node Scripts to Follow Users Back on GitHub

I started following people back on GitHub. First I thought this feature is useless. But since then I found a lot of interesting projects which I definitely would not have found. So I started this repository with some scripts to play around with the social features from GitHub.

First Steps

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/rueedlinger/ghfollow.git

2. Create a personal access token at https://github.com/settings/tokens/new?scopes=user:follow with only the access rights user:follow

3. Create a .env env file. Just rename example.env and replace the GH_ACCESS_TOKEN with your personal access token. Or save your access token as environment variable GH_FOLLOW_BACK_TOKEN.

GH_ACCESS_TOKEN=***** SECRET TOKEN *****

4. Install all required packages.

npm install

ghFollowBack.js

The Node script ghFollowBack.js is for those who want to follow GitHub users back with just one click. Just run the script to follow people back. If GH_UNFOLLOW=true set to true the script will also unfollow people which do not follow back.

node ghFollowBack.js

Run ghFollowBack.js as Daily Job With GitHub Actions

Store your personal access token as secret with the name GH_FOLLOW_BACK_TOKEN and create a GitHub Action which runs the ghFollowBack.js as a daily job (See .github/workflows/followback.yml).

name: FollowBack

on:
 # Runs at 12:00 UTC every day. 
 # Note there might be some delays (minutes) when the job is triggerd. 
 schedule:
 - cron: "0 12 * * *"

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: checkout 
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: setup node
      uses: actions/setup-node@v1
      with:
        node-version: 12
    - name: install modules
      run: npm install
    - name: run ghFollowBack.js
      env: 
        # set the token as secret
        GH_ACCESS_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GH_FOLLOW_BACK_TOKEN }}
        GH_UNFOLLOW: true
      run: node ghFollowBack.js

Get Some Insights From People You Follow

The node scripts ghStarred.js saves the latest starred repositories from people you follow in the CSV file starred.csv. If the file already exists new entries are append if they do not exist yet. To check if a entry already exist the GitHub project id is used.

node ghStarred.js

Jupyter Notebook - Analyze the CSV Data From ghStarred.js

To get some insights from people you follow on GitHub jun can run the Jupyter notebook notebook/starred.ipynb. This notebook loads the data from starred.csv file and plots the following charts.

What are the most starred programming languages?

What is the Relationship between forks, stars and open issues?

The project descriptions as world cloud

Git LFS

Some of the files (*.png, *.ipynb) are stored in Git LFS. When you want to work with them locally you need to install git-lfs and check them out.

git lfs checkout

Reference

• @octokit/request: https://github.com/octokit/request.js/
• API Starring: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/activity#starring
• API Followers: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/users#followers