A similar question has been asked here, but I am in a slightly different situation and feel that others may be as well. While I understand that it is possible to begin tracking GitHub repo traffic for the past 14 days and into the future, I am in a situation that requires historical data.
My workplace has put me and my coworkers in a desperate situation. We have open-source software on a public GitHub repository, and for private funding reasons, we need to report how many views/visits our repo has gotten over the last 12 months. Namely, our funding for next year is given by the quantity of visits to our repo last year multiplied by a dollars-per-visit scalar multiplier.
Today, of course, is the day we have realized that GitHub does not save traffic data for longer than 14 days. My boss has made it clear that our jobs are on the line, as he fully intends to forfeit this and other funding avenues for our project if we do not find this 12-month statistic -- this is incredibly embarrassing for him and bad for our relationship with the funding entity.
Obviously, any of the solutions that require me to go through the GitHub API to begin tracking traffic analytics today are not appropriate for this task, as GitHub only saves the last 14 days of data.
So, I would greatly appreciate any brainstorming on how I may find this data, and in turn, save the day for me and my coworkers. We must not be the first team on the planet to have run into this predicament.
My first thought is to see if any developer or entity has started a passion project saving total view-counts for public GitHub repos. An hour of googling has not turned up any findings.
My second thought is to try to find archived/historical versions of the GitHub insights/traffic page for our repo. Searching the archives that I am aware of does not turn up any findings.
My third thought is to try to find any third-party pipeline that tracks all-time visits to specific URLs. While I have been able to find the number of visits to
github.com, I have not been able to find the number of visits to our specific repo.
At this point, I am at my wit's end, and will be eternally grateful for any leads you may be able to provide. There must be a solution!
