GitHub

Follow the activity in your public and private repositories next to the rest of each project.

What you get

Metric	How it’s counted	Period value
Commits	Commits on the default branch, by commit date	Sum of the days
PRs merged	Pull requests merged, by merge date	Sum of the days
Lines changed	Lines added plus lines removed, leaving out merge commits	Sum of the days
Open issues	Issues open right now (pull requests excluded)	Latest observation

Releases become annotations on the project, so you can see what shipped when.

Days are counted in UTC. Open issues only appear if the repository has issues turned on.

Activity, not productivity

These numbers describe a repository’s activity. They aren’t a measure of anyone’s work, and one big commit can mean less than ten small ones.

Step 1: Create a token

A fine-grained personal access token lets you choose exactly which repositories Metribay can read, with read-only access.

1. On GitHub, open Settings → Developer settings → Personal access tokens → Fine-grained tokens and select Generate new token.

2. Give it a name like “Metribay”, and pick an expiration date.

3. Under Resource owner, choose yourself or the organisation that owns the repositories.

4. Under Repository access, choose Only select repositories and pick the ones to track.

5. Under Permissions → Repository permissions, set these to Read-only:

   • Contents
   • Issues
   • Pull requests

   Metadata is added as read-only on its own.

6. Select Generate token and copy it. GitHub shows it only once.

Some organisations must approve fine-grained tokens before they work. If the repositories don’t show up, ask an organisation owner to approve the request.

Plan for expiry

When the token expires, the source shows Needs attention. Set a calendar reminder, create a new token before then and update the saved account.

Step 2: Connect it in Metribay

1. Select Add source and choose GitHub.

2. Open Use your own credentials and paste the token into Personal access token.

3. Select Save account and continue.

4. Choose a repository from the list.

5. Pick a project and select Connect and start import.

Enter the repository by hand

Open Enter a resource manually and type it as owner/repository, like octocat/hello-world.

Other ways to sign in

Classic personal access token. Works too. For public repositories it needs no scopes. For private ones it needs the repo scope, which also grants write access, so prefer a fine-grained token.

GitHub App. If you run your own GitHub App, open Use a GitHub App instead and fill in its Client Id, Installation Id and GitHub App private key (PEM). Give the app read-only Contents, Issues and Pull requests permissions. With an app, enter repositories by hand: the list isn’t available.

Good to know

• First imports can take a while for busy repositories, because Metribay reads every commit, pull request and release in the history window.
• Every sync rereads the whole history window. Commits can turn up on the default branch long after they were written, when a branch is merged. Rereading keeps the counts right.
• Long windows on very large repositories may hit GitHub’s limits. If the first import fails, try a shorter history window.

See also Troubleshooting.