GitHub Issues Tracker

This application tracks the number of issues for any GitHub Public Repository for various different timeframes. It is built with Node.js, Express and Cheerio.

Getting Started

Assuming you've cloned the project to your local machine, you'll need to install a few dependencies:

cd github-issue-tracker/
npm install

Once that's out of the way, you can go ahead and start the server:

npm start

Now, the application will be available on http://localhost:3000

Explanation

• User provides the link on the app. AJAX call is made to the API.
• Obtain the username and repository through the API as parameters.
• Make a request for the issues page of the repository and get the total no. of open issues.
• Filter all the issues' timestamps based on CSS selectors and store them in array.
• Check if the pagination panel exists and the next button is enabled.
• If so, keep making requests for subsequent pages until we have all the issues data.
• Also check if the last issue on the page is older than a week, we can stop making requests in that case.
• Compute the number of issues in different categories based on their recency, for requests older than a week we just have to subract the other two from the total.
• Return the data in JSON object.
• Render the information as a table on app.

Improvements

Given more time, significant improvements could be made to the:

• Backend API i.e. validation, error handling, scraping more rich data like titles and comments on issues, sentiment analysis on the content.

• UI/UX of the application frontend, making it easier for users to obtain useful information from the site in less time.

Project could also be improved by updating it to use the GitHub Issues REST API directly.