Forums : Ohloh API Discussion
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API access for total number of projects
Im trying to measure growth of FOSS and I need some data on the number of projects on Ohloh. How would I go about getting this kind of info?
Vlad,
There is a way to figure the highest number of projects on ohloh at any one time. I just don't remember what that is. I will experiment with it and get back to you. (Each project has two ways into that project's page: a name and a number. The number is the secret of it.)
Thanks!
Vlad,
Through brute force I find 143,076 projects currently. Be aware that there are a good number of dupes and many projects that are sheer puffery with no substance. You'll need to figure that out for yourself, sadly. Also, I'm sure that there must be some bias in the fact that a large majority (but not all) projects here are voluntarily added by the project contributors, managers or fans. Explore our API to reveal some of these facts at http://meta.ohloh.net/getting_started/
Thanks!
Its a shame that there are no API calls for general statistics like project size, number of contributes etc.
Vlad,
I suspect that those in control often monitor these forums. Hopefully you'll get them sooner or later. There is a need (from what I can see) for a more generic form of API that gets those kind of statistics on an overall basis rather than project-by-project.
Please add any other features you'd like to see in an ideal API for the uses you envision.
Thanks!
Is there any way to get a month by month project total?
@ssnow-blackduck when you say by brute force
, do you mean by asking for project with ID 1, then 2, then ... until you get some sort of error? How do you differentiate between an error that means a project with ID X was here, but got deleted
and there are no more projects in the db
?
Thanks!
Sarah,
I'm not certain the difference in appearance between the response from a project that has been deleted and a project that hasn't been created yet. Let me look and see if I can define that. I can only presume I'd get a 404
style-error for the one that hasn't been created. It turns out that I get an identical error on deleted pages. Looks like the current number is 623280 for the brute-force method taking into account the likelihood of new pages being deleted more commonly than established pages. I can see that the number I got above is incorrect even for 23 days ago. Apologies to all.
Thanks @ssnow-blackduck. I'm curious because I want to iterate over all the projects and gather some data myself. I guess at 1000 API calls / day that will take quite a while!
I notice that on the front page of Ohloh the hero unit
(in Bootstrap speak) says:
Tracking 513,419 source control repositories
and
Indexing 572,372 open source projects
so I guess that means that around 60,000 projects share an enlistment with another project.
I'm still not entirely sure how best to iterate over all projects using the REST API, but I guess incrementing the project IDs is still the only way to do it.