Planetarium - GitHub Stargazers rendered in Google Charts

Planetarium is a slightly eccentric implementation that allows you to generate a PNG chart of a repository's Stargazers over time.

Prerequisites

Python 3 with pip
Docker
Steampipe with GitHub plugin
GitHub Access Token

Instructions

Create a GitHub access token with the following scopes:

• repo (all)
• read:org
• read:user
• gist
• user:email

The user must have access to the desired repository.

Install Python requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Install Steampipe (Multi-platform installation guide)

Install GitHub plugin with:
steampipe plugin install github

Edit ~/.steampipe/config/github.spc to include GitHub token:

connection "github" {
  plugin = "github"
  token  = "111222333444555666777888999aaabbbcccddde"
}

Clone the repository. Run the query script with the full orgname/repo that you want to generate Stargazers for:

./query.sh TechToSpeech/terraform-aws-serverless-static-wordpress

This will need to pull the selenium/standalone-chrome container which is reasonably large (~450mb). A couple of python scripts then run and download the generated chart as stargazers.png to the directory where the script was run.

That's it!

How it Works

This is termed an 'eccentric' implementation because Google Charts has no external API and the chart must be generated via Javascript in an HTML page. Most browsers will not allow a local html file:// to embed a local Javascript file, (it throws CORS errors) so this must be accessed over a 'real' HTTP server. Here we've customised an extremely minimal Python implementation that runs for precisely three requests that are necessary to generate the chart, and then closes. Selenium is required to emulate the user activity to automatically download the chart to the local machine using Javascript prompts.

The chart requires data source for the chart data. Here we're using a CSV file imported using jquery.csv.js where the data is loaded from a local file. See data.csv for an example of expected format.

That file is populated by Steampipe's amazing ability to query the GitHub API as simple SQL: We've written an appropriate query to aggregate your repository's Stargazers by hour, so as to create the nice smooth graph that takes into account hours within the day, and not just the daily total.

This result is piped out as a local file which is then ingested by the HTML/Javascript that generates the chart.

Customise the Chart

As the chart uses Google Charts, you can check out their documentation on how to customier the chart to your liking. The default here is a curved line chart which is nice and smooth, but it could be bar chart, or any other style you'd like.

This repository is highly adaptable - if you want to run this as a continuous web service all you need to do is place the chart.html within a real web server and then decide how often you want to refresh the CSV data via Steampipe.

Troubleshooting

There are a couple of sleep commands in the query script to help avoid possible race conditions. Depending on the performance of your local machine each step might need a second or two to become consistent, so if you're using a particularly slow machine you might need to increase these.

Should the script error out you will probably have to do two things to recover and try again:

• Kill the minimal.py script running as a background process (kill -9 $(pidof python3 minimal.py))
• Forcible remove the selenium container (docker rm -f chrome-selenium)

Contributing

Please do. This can certainly be improved in very many ways and everything here is the product of one late-night obsession to make it work.