Add graph feature to show a star chart/graph of a repository

[hedyhli]

We can use probably a --graph option to display a graph of the star/fork/watcher or just the stars of one or more repositories, choosing a specific repository or display a graph for all repos fetched from search() is undecided. Play around and experiment with what you should do, if we are going to display a graph for every repo fetched, we should make the graph option one of the --layout choices.

Don't forget to update the help and usage both in __main__.py and also in the readme.

[shivam212]

Hey, I would like to work on this, I am a newcomer to open source, any pointers on how to start on this?

[hedyhli]

You can setup your development environment using the tutorial in the contributing file, if it’s working properly you are good to go. This feature request is mainly about displaying a graph (or ASCII graph) in the terminal as described in the description above, you can try doing it locally on your computer, and push it and open a pull request. If you are stuck, feel free to ask 😃

Check this out for inspiration: https://starchart.cc/hedythedev/starcli

[shivam212]

Thanks for the help!

[shivam212]

@hedythedev I may have to scrape and form the data for stars collected over a period of time myself, and doing that may take a longer time for repos with a very high number of stars, and can cause the program to slow down, should we look at only displaying graphs for repos with just enough stars so that the data scraping does not slow the whole thing down?

You can see the same problem here, https://starchart.cc/torvalds/linux, because this repo has a whole lot stars, the graph does not load.

[hedyhli]

Oh, I see. We could initially try getting all the star data, then after a timeout, it can display a message saying the star data is too much, and prompt the user to input a time range which to fetch the star info, if it's still after timeout, we can default it to probably one month. Is that better?

[hedyhli]

And if you know how to, we could also cache the data (maybe when starcli is running something else concurrently) so we don't have to scrape it again and again

[shivam212]

Oh, I see. We could initially try getting all the star data, then after a timeout, it can display a message saying the star data is too much, and prompt the user to input a time range which to fetch the star info, if it's still after timeout, we can default it to probably one month. Is that better?

Yes, could be done.

And if you know how to, we could also cache the data (maybe when starcli is running something else concurrently) so we don't have to scrape it again and again

I'll have a go at this.

[hedyhli]

Take your time 😄

[shivam212]

@hedythedev should we start off with making the graph listings as a new option? We can choose, say the 3 top repos, and show the graphs for them.

[hedyhli]

Sure, we could probably start by creating a function that takes in a string of the repo name (user/repo), fetch the stats, then if possible, display the graph. If the above is achieved, then we can do the command line option so that, maybe, the user can call it like starcli --graph ‘psf/black’ (Or some other repo), and a graph is displayed. We might deal with displaying a graph for the repos fetched from search() later