GOV.UK Frontend GitHub statistics

Repo for the collection, storage and analysis of statistics collected from open repos using GOV.UK Frontend on github.

What we collect

This repo contains a list of repos that we:

1. think are government services
2. know are using GOV.UK Frontend directly

We specifically collect and store the following from our list of repos:

• The name of the repo
• The owner of the repo ie: the github user or org
• The version of GOV.UK Frontend being used, as best we are able to work out

We collect the above data by filtering GOV.UK Frontend's raw dependents data, which we collect using the github-dependents-info package. Whilst we filter this data, we still store repos rejected from filtering of the raw data to assess the accuracy of our filtering.

Note

We do not use this information to calculate or collect PII (Personally Identifiable Information) from individual github user accounts

How it works

We filter and analyse our dependents data by looping through it and doing the following per loop:

1. We cross reference the repo against an owner list of github owners we know operate government services and a words list to flag repo names that don't look like services eg: "form-prototype", "book-driving-test-beta", "apply-to-vote-tech-demo" etc. This is cross referenced against an allow and deny list which bypass name filtering.
2. We get the repo's latest file tree and look for:
   • lib/usage_stats.js, which indicates that the repo is an old instance of the GOV.UK Prototype Kit and is therefore unlikely to be a live service
   • a package.json file. The absence of this indicates that the service can't be using GOV.UK Frontend as a direct dependency
   • a lockfile. We only look for either package-lock.json or yarn.lock
3. We look for the following in package.json:
   • A dependency on govuk-frontend, which we then read the version from
   • A dependency on govuk-prototype-kit. This is evidence that the repo is a new instance of the Prototype Kit which again indicates that it can't be a service
4. If the version of GOV.UK Frontend we retrieved is using semver approximation syntax eg "^4.7.0" or "~5.1.0" then we check the lockfile and attempt to ascertain the actual version
5. We build our data and write it to data/filtered-data.json