Gitrep - Discover and organize Github repositories

Gitrep - Discover and organize Github repositories (gitrep.com)

76 points by zellux 13 years ago | 46 comments

brandoncor 13 years ago |

Funny, I owned this domain until July of this year and was planning to build the exact same thing. I was in my "have an idea, get excited, buy the domain, do nothing, let it expire" phase.

Glad to see you picked it up and actually built and launched.

sevenadrian 13 years ago | |

ha, thanks! I knew I was lucky with a useful 6 letter domain. If you have any ideas that you had wanted to implement but don't see please let me know!

and thanks for the domain brandon!

wise_young_man 13 years ago |

I like where this is going. I blogged about this very topic a few months ago http://derekmyers.com/open-source-information-overload. If you watch/star as many repos as I do then you realize the problem is clear. Discovering and filtering repos is incredibly difficult, but the vast resources are there and growing at an even more incredible rate.

Say you are a web designer who just found out about GitHub (I know right?), then what would their first steps look like? Maybe spend hours googling around random sites discovering outdated "10 popular plugins for Bootstrap" kind of stuff. I think this applies to all kinds of things as well.

I also think this is one of the reasons they took on funding to figure out these problems. I had been contemplating adding similar functionality to my GitHub web app. I kind of think they should start an app marketplace (I know YAAM) to bring additional functionality beyond the scope of GitHub that wants to manage (ex: they killed off messages), I realize they have Services, but I don't think that is clearly enough, similar to how Facebook recently added App Center.

sevenadrian 13 years ago | |

awesome, thanks wise young man, this is exactly one of the problems I personally experienced that I was hoping to solve.

I am also interested in how this plays out. Maybe this project will succeed, or maybe something else better solves the problem. Either way I think it will be awesome.

There is so much out there, it can sometimes be hard to make sense of it or manage it in a way that suites someone the best. This is just my stab at trying to solve the problem.

If you have any other input on how to make it more useful please just let me know! Thanks again!

mamcx 13 years ago |

You know what I love to know? Which branch is the most uptodate! The network page of github is slow and hard to see what is going on.

Some repos become dead then I look for forks to see if somebody fix it or improve it. Normally, I need to open several forks to select one.

I imagine a interface like a leaderboard where the most uptodate and with more commits lead the pack...

seliopou 13 years ago | |

On GitHub there's a "Branches" tab for each repo which lists how many commits ahead or behind master each branch is. Sounds like it's close to what you're looking for.

5vforest 13 years ago | | |

I think s/he means "Which fork is most up-to-date?"

sevenadrian 13 years ago | |

Hmm, never thought of that, excellent idea mamcx!

I'll start scoping that out and see what a solution would look like, seems like it would helpful for a lot of projects.

Thanks for the idea mamcx!

xbryanx 13 years ago |

I was really hoping that this would be a service that would allow me to organize my private repositories into folders. I know I can do this with submodules, but I was hoping for an easy user interface. I'm guessing this is an area where you could make money, until GitHub solves the problem.

I find it difficult to track the 100+ private repos we have for various projects and such. Giving me some ability to organize them by folders along with some general notes, would be useful and something I'd pay a small bit of cash for.

troutwine 13 years ago |

This sounds neat!

> Typically it is not easy to answer questions like "What is the most popular jQuery Instagram library?" or "What Ruby gems are similar to Devise but newer?".

> This is where Gitrep aims to help.

But, then, I totally failed to discover how to do that sort of search. The search dialog seems to be tag based. Is the copy aspirational or am I missing something?

sevenadrian 13 years ago | |

creator here!

tl;dr: yes, it is a little aspirational as of now, but will change.

The first search you can do, since I equate "star count" to popularity, and by default all results are sorted by star count/popularity.

The second search will be entirely implemented soon. You can find repos similar to other repos according to their tags, but can't sort by created or updated date yet. The information is there in the data, I just need to finish that functionality in the search and sorting.

I wanted to try to get something out the door before I finished every feature to see what people would use and what requests/issues people would have, and prioritize accordingly. Otherwise I know I would spend weeks fleshing out every feature I thought I wanted, including many that most would find useless =(.

In retrospect, you are correct in that it is a little misleading since you assume you can do that yet. It will hopefully be corrected shortly (busy trying to keep things running smoothly!).

Thanks for the input troutwine! I'll finish this functionality hopefully this week (if not sooner).

mesm 13 years ago | | |

I hope to see something like alternativeto.net too, were you can link multiple items and compare facts about them. I realize this is what can be done with the tags. It can be easier to see which programs are similar than coming up with a unique tag for them though.

troutwine 13 years ago | | |

Thanks and good luck! Do you have a twitter account I can follow for updates to gitrep?

DanielRibeiro 13 years ago |

Cool. But how is it different from Github's own https://github.com/stars ?

It was announced a few months ago https://github.com/blog/1236-searching-and-filtering-stars

sevenadrian 13 years ago | |

you can add tags, instead of just searching based on language (and description). Hopefully as things begin the flesh out, you will be able to more easily find other similar repos and repos of interest (through the "similar repos by tags" and "similar repos by stars"/"users who star this repo all star these other repos" functionality).

Very soon, besides being able to sort by popularity/star count, you will be able to sort (and search) by created date, updated date, and forks.

Also, there have been some requests to make this more service agnostic outside of just github.

So those are some points that hopefully make it more useful than github's current search functionality.

Hawkee 13 years ago | |

There GitHub doesn't offer a way to sort by the number of stars or even see the number of stars.

DigitalJack 13 years ago | |

It adds tags, for one thing. Not sure if there is more.

niggler 13 years ago |

This would be far more useful as a general curated open source database if github access were not required (one useful side effect is that, when it is down the next time, gitrep would still be up). Then it would be possible to specify alternative repo locations

Hawkee 13 years ago |

Very good to see more sites utilizing the GitHub API. I do have a few comments to make though. First, you mention badges on the homepage, but this feature isn't complete so I don't think its even necessary to mention it yet. Second, the search is somewhat confusing. I'd love just a single search box at the top of the site where I can type whatever I'd like. Maybe make the current search the "Advanced Search". Third, I probably wouldn't emphasize the tagging so much. I'd probably never tag anything and rely entirely on the data you're gathering from GitHub. I think it's much better to focus on the sorting algorithm and how easy it is to find popular repos.

niggler 13 years ago | |

IMHO it's a bad thing. Too many projects and services depend on github so that downtime represents a systemic risk (homebrew was unusable during the downtime last week). Sure, you have your code backed up, but you don't necessarily have your issue tracker or gists backed up.

Now using GitHub for user credentials makes things even worse. Soon we'll see horror stories involving github being down ...

technoweenie 13 years ago | | |

We encourage all GitHub apps to use proper caching on their end. There's no good reason that a hit on a 3rd party site like Gitrep should relate to one or more GitHub API calls. Use HTTP conditional GETs to retrieve data, and any 304's (cache hits) will not impact your rate limit.

Based on its support of tags/searching, I'd imagine Gitrep is being responsible here though.

Hawkee 13 years ago | | |

You can say the same for Twitter, Facebook and Google. There is always the potential for downtime, but users generally don't want to create more accounts. I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Plus, sites that use GitHub logins are much more appealing to developers rather than sites that use Facebook or Twitter logins.

wise_young_man 13 years ago | | |

Since git is distributed, they could just have a mirror on Bitbucket.

thomseddon 13 years ago |

Just signed up, really love the design both front end and once logged in however I'm not really sure what to do with it?

So you can tag stuff (granted, quite useful) and search tags? Is this more useful that googling what you want/need?

sevenadrian 13 years ago | |

hard to say if it is more or less useful, but hopefully easier (and therefor more useful).

this hopes to centralize the search for good repos, instead of having to turn to a generalized search engine, and ideally add some functionality that facilitates the search (search/sort by created date, updated date, popularity, find similar repos, etc.).

addandsubtract 13 years ago |

This is godsent. I have over 100 starred repos for various reasons and the only sorting github allows is through language. So naturally, finding old repos is extremely tedious. I'm going to start using this right away.

jqueryin 13 years ago |

Very cool. I publicly tagged at least 25 things as I went through my starred list.

I did notice that the auto-completion of the tags is likely experiencing a missing table index as it seems to take quite awhile to find any matches. This could be as simple as increased DB usage from hitting HN, but it might be worth looking into.

One other suggestion I have, and I'm sure it's likely on the horizon, is to give users the ability to star/watch repos directly from the listings page. I've found some cool shit I'd like to star on the fly without having to jump over to github.

bink-lynch 13 years ago |

Nice work! That I can organize repositories by my own tags seems very useful and I second the "most up-to-date fork" feature request.

I happened upon a once-in-a-sign-up bug. Here are the steps to reproduce (I cannot reproduce it anymore as it will only happen the first time you need to allow gitrep access to your github profile):

1. Sign in to gitrep. 2. Allow gitrep access to your github profile. 3. Hit the back button until it asks you to allow gitrep access to your github profile again. 4. Hit allow. 5. Notice 500 error.

sevenadrian 13 years ago |

thanks for the interest everyone! This is my project that I just launched, thought I'd say hello!

I'll start answering questions as quickly as I can, it's the only thanks I can offer now for everyone melting my servers!

Very quickly some technical specs (going to write a post on this in more depth soon):

It's a ruby on rails application hosted on heroku. Unit testing with rspec, webmock, vcr, machinist, and capybara. Authentication is with devise obviously, with omniauth-github, and cancan and rolfy for authorization. Unicorn since it's awesome, and asynchronous jobs are taken care of by sidekiq. fragment caching is done with dalli/memcached. database is postgres, redis, and memcached, with monitoring by newrelic and logging by loggly and papertrail. Let me know if you have any questions!

rabialam 13 years ago |

Awesome! Such a pain point that needs an actual solution -- I'm honestly pretty underwhelmed with GitHub for not providing this kind of functionality in the first place. Glad someone took the initiative to do something not just cool, but so very necessary with the GitHub API.

jimmytucson 13 years ago |

FYI (@ 11:09 AM EST): an error occurred in the application and 'gitreb.com' could not be served.

Twidi 13 years ago |

Same idea as http://repos.io ?

AdamGibbins 13 years ago |

This is awesome, thank you. I've got 300 starred repos which renders the entire system effectively useless as I cannot find anything. Gitrep looks like it'll fix this awesomely, thanks!

mctx 13 years ago |

Neat!

Mobile search view is a little cluttered, and the sort dropdown doesn't seem to be changeable.

http://imgur.com/KNl9t.jpg

arms 13 years ago |

Nice idea and implementation.

I noticed a typo in the About copy on the main page: "along with apply personal tags" should be "along with applying personal tags"

kylemaxwell 13 years ago |

Seems like it's already been slashdotted (HNed?). I spend too much time trying to do this manually and really hope that this works out, though!

rjsamson 13 years ago |

Pretty cool - as someone with probably way too many starred repositories its nice to have the ability to organize them.

aleem 13 years ago |

Couldn't read the repos listing on my Iphone the display was quite mangled. Will check again when I'm near a laptop.

DannoHung 13 years ago |

Please add some tag filtering tools on the left of the user page. A little tag cloud would be nice, for example.

sevenadrian 13 years ago | |

like a personal tag cloud that applies just to the tags of that users starred repos? actually that's not a bad idea

paullth 13 years ago |

Sweeet, can't believe github still dont have something like this

jhgaylor 13 years ago |

Bravo! I've already found 4 new awesome projects to follow.

lpinca 13 years ago |

Like the design.