[git] Can you get the number of lines of code from a GitHub repository?

In a GitHub repository you can see “language statistics”, which displays the percentage of the project that’s written in a language. It doesn’t, however, display how many lines of code the project consists of. Often, I want to quickly get an impression of the scale and complexity of a project, and the count of lines of code can give a good first impression. 500 lines of code implies a relatively simple project, 100,000 lines of code implies a very large/complicated project.

So, is it possible to get the lines of code written in the various languages from a GitHub repository, preferably without cloning it?


The question “Count number of lines in a git repository” asks how to count the lines of code in a local Git repository, but:

  1. You have to clone the project, which could be massive. Cloning a project like Wine, for example, takes ages.
  2. You would count lines in files that wouldn’t necessarily be code, like i13n files.
  3. If you count just (for example) Ruby files, you’d potentially miss massive amount of code in other languages, like JavaScript. You’d have to know beforehand which languages the project uses. You’d also have to repeat the count for every language the project uses.

All in all, this is potentially far too time-intensive for “quickly checking the scale of a project”.

This question is related to git github line-count

The answer is


Pipe the output from the number of lines in each file to sort to organize files by line count. git ls-files | xargs wc -l |sort -n


There is an extension for Google Chrome browser - GLOC which works for public and private repos.

Counts the number of lines of code of a project from:

  • project detail page
  • user's repositories
  • organization page
  • search results page
  • trending page
  • explore page

enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here


If you go to the graphs/contributors page, you can see a list of all the contributors to the repo and how many lines they've added and removed.

Unless I'm missing something, subtracting the aggregate number of lines deleted from the aggregate number of lines added among all contributors should yield the total number of lines of code in the repo. (EDIT: it turns out I was missing something after all. Take a look at orbitbot's comment for details.)

UPDATE:

This data is also available in GitHub's API. So I wrote a quick script to fetch the data and do the calculation:

_x000D_
_x000D_
'use strict';

async function countGithub(repo) {
    const response = await fetch(`https://api.github.com/repos/${repo}/stats/contributors`)
    const contributors = await response.json();
    const lineCounts = contributors.map(contributor => (
        contributor.weeks.reduce((lineCount, week) => lineCount + week.a - week.d, 0)
    ));
    const lines = lineCounts.reduce((lineTotal, lineCount) => lineTotal + lineCount);
    window.alert(lines);
}

countGithub('jquery/jquery'); // or count anything you like
_x000D_
_x000D_
_x000D_

Just paste it in a Chrome DevTools snippet, change the repo and click run.

Disclaimer (thanks to lovasoa):

Take the results of this method with a grain of salt, because for some repos (sorich87/bootstrap-tour) it results in negative values, which might indicate there's something wrong with the data returned from GitHub's API.

UPDATE:

Looks like this method to calculate total line numbers isn't entirely reliable. Take a look at orbitbot's comment for details.


From the @Tgr's comment, there is an online tool : https://codetabs.com/count-loc/count-loc-online.html

LOC counting example for strimzi/strimzi-kafka-operator repository


You can run something like

git ls-files | xargs wc -l

which will give you the total count ?

lines of code

Or use this tool ? http://line-count.herokuapp.com/


A shell script, cloc-git

You can use this shell script to count the number of lines in a remote Git repository with one command:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
git clone --depth 1 "$1" temp-linecount-repo &&
  printf "('temp-linecount-repo' will be deleted automatically)\n\n\n" &&
  cloc temp-linecount-repo &&
  rm -rf temp-linecount-repo

Installation

This script requires CLOC (“Count Lines of Code”) to be installed. cloc can probably be installed with your package manager – for example, brew install cloc with Homebrew. There is also a docker image published under mribeiro/cloc.

You can install the script by saving its code to a file cloc-git, running chmod +x cloc-git, and then moving the file to a folder in your $PATH such as /usr/local/bin.

Usage

The script takes one argument, which is any URL that git clone will accept. Examples are https://github.com/evalEmpire/perl5i.git (HTTPS) or [email protected]:evalEmpire/perl5i.git (SSH). You can get this URL from any GitHub project page by clicking “Clone or download”.

Example output:

$ cloc-git https://github.com/evalEmpire/perl5i.git
Cloning into 'temp-linecount-repo'...
remote: Counting objects: 200, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (182/182), done.
remote: Total 200 (delta 13), reused 158 (delta 9), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (200/200), 296.52 KiB | 110.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (13/13), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
('temp-linecount-repo' will be deleted automatically)


     171 text files.
     166 unique files.                                          
      17 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.62  T=1.13 s (134.1 files/s, 9764.6 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Perl                           149           2795           1425           6382
JSON                             1              0              0            270
YAML                             2              0              0            198
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                           152           2795           1425           6850
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alternatives

Run the commands manually

If you don’t want to bother saving and installing the shell script, you can run the commands manually. An example:

$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/evalEmpire/perl5i.git
$ cloc perl5i
$ rm -rf perl5i

Linguist

If you want the results to match GitHub’s language percentages exactly, you can try installing Linguist instead of CLOC. According to its README, you need to gem install linguist and then run linguist. I couldn’t get it to work (issue #2223).


If the question is "can you quickly get NUMBER OF LINES of a github repo", the answer is no as stated by the other answers.

However, if the question is "can you quickly check the SCALE of a project", I usually gauge a project by looking at its size. Of course the size will include deltas from all active commits, but it is a good metric as the order of magnitude is quite close.

E.g.

How big is the "docker" project?

In your browser, enter api.github.com/repos/ORG_NAME/PROJECT_NAME i.e. api.github.com/repos/docker/docker

In the response hash, you can find the size attribute:

{
    ...
    size: 161432,
    ...
}

This should give you an idea of the relative scale of the project. The number seems to be in KB, but when I checked it on my computer it's actually smaller, even though the order of magnitude is consistent. (161432KB = 161MB, du -s -h docker = 65MB)


There in another online tool that counts lines of code for public and private repos without having to clone/download them - https://klock.herokuapp.com/

screenshot


You can use GitHub API to get the sloc like the following function

function getSloc(repo, tries) {

    //repo is the repo's path
    if (!repo) {
        return Promise.reject(new Error("No repo provided"));
    }

    //GitHub's API may return an empty object the first time it is accessed
    //We can try several times then stop
    if (tries === 0) {
        return Promise.reject(new Error("Too many tries"));
    }

    let url = "https://api.github.com/repos" + repo + "/stats/code_frequency";

    return fetch(url)
        .then(x => x.json())
        .then(x => x.reduce((total, changes) => total + changes[1] + changes[2], 0))
        .catch(err => getSloc(repo, tries - 1));
}

Personally I made an chrome extension which shows the number of SLOC on both github project list and project detail page. You can also set your personal access token to access private repositories and bypass the api rate limit.

You can download from here https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/github-sloc/fkjjjamhihnjmihibcmdnianbcbccpnn

Source code is available here https://github.com/martianyi/github-sloc


You can clone just the latest commit using git clone --depth 1 <url> and then perform your own analysis using Linguist, the same software Github uses. That's the only way I know you're going to get lines of code.

Another option is to use the API to list the languages the project uses. It doesn't give them in lines but in bytes. For example...

$ curl https://api.github.com/repos/evalEmpire/perl5i/languages
{
  "Perl": 274835
}

Though take that with a grain of salt, that project includes YAML and JSON which the web site acknowledges but the API does not.

Finally, you can use code search to ask which files match a given language. This example asks which files in perl5i are Perl. https://api.github.com/search/code?q=language:perl+repo:evalEmpire/perl5i. It will not give you lines, and you have to ask for the file size separately using the returned url for each file.


Open terminal and run the following:

curl https://api.codetabs.com/v1/loc?github=username/reponame

Hey all this is ridiculously easy...

  1. Create a new branch from your first commit
  2. When you want to find out your stats, create a new PR from main
  3. The PR will show you the number of changed lines - as you're doing a PR from the first commit all your code will be counted as new lines

And the added benefit is that if you don't approve the PR and just leave it in place, the stats (No of commits, files changed and total lines of code) will simply keep up-to-date as you merge changes into main. :) Enjoy.

enter image description here


Firefox add-on Github SLOC

I wrote a small firefox addon that prints the number of lines of code on github project pages: Github SLOC


npm install sloc -g
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vuejs/vue/
sloc ".\vue\src" --format cli-table
rm -rf ".\vue\"

Instructions and Explanation

  1. Install sloc from npm, a command line tool (Node.js needs to be installed).
npm install sloc -g
  1. Clone shallow repository (faster download than full clone).
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/facebook/react/
  1. Run sloc and specifiy the path that should be analyzed.
sloc ".\react\src" --format cli-table

sloc supports formatting the output as a cli-table, as json or csv. Regular expressions can be used to exclude files and folders (Further information on npm).

  1. Delete repository folder (optional)

Powershell: rm -r -force ".\react\" or on Mac/Unix: rm -rf ".\react\"

Screenshots of the executed steps (cli-table):

sloc output as acli-table

sloc output (no arguments):

sloc output without arguments

It is also possible to get details for every file with the --details option:

sloc ".\react\src" --format cli-table --details     

Examples related to git

Does the target directory for a git clone have to match the repo name? Git fatal: protocol 'https' is not supported Git is not working after macOS Update (xcrun: error: invalid active developer path (/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools) git clone: Authentication failed for <URL> destination path already exists and is not an empty directory SSL_connect: SSL_ERROR_SYSCALL in connection to github.com:443 GitLab remote: HTTP Basic: Access denied and fatal Authentication How can I switch to another branch in git? VS 2017 Git Local Commit DB.lock error on every commit How to remove an unpushed outgoing commit in Visual Studio?

Examples related to github

Does the target directory for a git clone have to match the repo name? Issue in installing php7.2-mcrypt How can I switch to another branch in git? How to draw checkbox or tick mark in GitHub Markdown table? How to add a new project to Github using VS Code git clone error: RPC failed; curl 56 OpenSSL SSL_read: SSL_ERROR_SYSCALL, errno 10054 How to add empty spaces into MD markdown readme on GitHub? key_load_public: invalid format git - remote add origin vs remote set-url origin Cloning specific branch

Examples related to line-count

Can you get the number of lines of code from a GitHub repository? Eclipse count lines of code Count number of lines in a git repository How do you count the lines of code in a Visual Studio solution? How to get line count of a large file cheaply in Python?