GitHub¶

The GitHub connector tracks your repositories' adoption (stars, forks, releases, traffic) and proposes your widely used projects as evidence of original contributions.

Add your account or a repo¶

Paste any of these on the Sources page, or pass it to areao1 import:

Input	What it tracks
`https://github.com/mayachen` or `github:mayachen`	Every repo the account owns
`https://github.com/orgs/tidy-lab` or `https://github.com/tidy-lab`	The organization's repos
`https://github.com/mayachen/tidy-ml` or `github:mayachen/tidy-ml`	One repo

Forks are skipped unless you set connectors.include_forks: true in areao1.yaml.

Public repos need no token. Without one, GitHub allows far fewer API requests an hour, so a large account may hit the rate limit. Area O1 waits up to a minute and retries; if the limit lasts longer, it says how long and you can try again later (or add a token).

Private repos and traffic¶

To read private repos, or traffic for any repo, add a read-only fine-grained personal access token.

Open GitHub's new-token page. Area O1 links to it with the right permissions filled in (the Sources page's Create one with minimum scopes link, or the link areao1 import --private prints).
Under Repository access, choose the repos you want tracked.

Under Repository permissions, set:

Permission	Access	Why
Metadata	Read-only	Required by GitHub for any token
Contents	Read-only	Private repos, their READMEs and releases
Administration	Read-only	Only if you want traffic (views and clones)

Generate the token and copy it.
Add it in one of these ways:
- Sources page: press Private repos? Add a read-only token, paste it, then Import.
- Command line:
```
areao1 import https://github.com/mayachen --private
```
  It prints the token link and prompts for the token (hidden as you type). - From an environment variable: areao1 import https://github.com/mayachen --token-env GITHUB_TOKEN.

The token goes to your OS keychain under the name github:<handle>; sources.json stores only that name. To replace it later, press Re-auth on the source.

Read-only only

Never give Area O1 a token with write permissions. It only ever reads.

What it reads¶

For each repo:

Metric	From
`stars`, `forks`, `watchers`, `open_issues`	The repo record
`contributors`	The contributor list (anonymous contributors included)
`releases`	The release list
`views`, `views_unique`, `clones`, `clones_unique`	Traffic, one row per day (needs a token with Administration read)

Each snapshot is saved as an observation, with claims that quote the exact fields (for example "stargazers_count": 1840).

What it proposes¶

Open-source project for original contributions, when a repo has at least 5 stars (connectors.min_stars_for_candidate). The candidate notes signals such as widely adopted (100+ stars), used by others (10+ forks) and sustained activity (3+ releases), plus language, topics and created date.
A paper, for each arXiv link in the repo's README. A link doesn't prove authorship, so you confirm it. The same paper found by a scholarly connector is proposed only once.

Traffic and the 14-day window¶

GitHub keeps traffic for only the last 14 days. To build a longer history, Area O1 stores every daily point it sees in data/metrics.csv.

The metrics-snapshot job does this. While areao1 up is running, it's scheduled on Mondays and skips unless 13 or more days have passed since the last snapshot, so it runs every other week, inside GitHub's window. You can also run it by hand at any time:

areao1 run metrics-snapshot

If Area O1 isn't running for more than two weeks, the days in between are lost: GitHub no longer has them. Adding a source also takes a snapshot right away (skip that with --no-snapshot).