Perl script rummages through Git metadata

Under the Hood

Article from Issue 174/2015
Author(s):

GitHub is not only home to the code repositories of many well-known open source projects, but it also offers a sophisticated API that opens up wonderful opportunities for snooping around.

Hardly a software project today manages without Git. Once you have experienced the performance benefits, SVN will feel like something from the age of stagecoaches. Because GitHub has built a nice UI around this service, which is free and reliably stores your data, and because it's so easy to contribute through pull requests, many developers like myself swear by the San Francisco-based Git hoster.

Over the years, 57 publicly visible repositories have accumulated in my account; most contain CPAN modules, but more esoteric content like the text data for my blog usarundbrief.com is also stored there [1]. You can dig up some interesting facts by messing around in the associated metadata with Perl.

Especially in the context of automatic build systems, it's essential that access to the metadata in the Git repositories not be exclusively browser-based. Instead, automated scripts leverage APIs to retrieve everything you need from the cornucopia of data. To control this in Perl, the Net::GitHub collection of modules by Fayland Lam is available on CPAN. Equipped with the necessary access privileges, the API user can both access (Figure 1) and actively modify programs, say, by adding some new code.

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