Please provide Github Actions usage statistics to developers

Code to Cloud GitHub Actions
#1

I have a GitHub Actions action on the marketplace which I developed. Other than stars and forks, how do I know how many users are actually using my action?

Without such metrics, there is no motivation for me to continue improving my action, fix bugs or add more features. Adding something like Google Analytics inside my Typescript action would give me this information but I HATE to do this to the end users. If I was a user, I wouldn’t trust any GitHub action to collect usage statistics anonymously and without invading my privacy. If GitHub provides this information to developers, it would be more trustworthy. Moreover, GitHub can allow end users to opt out of this as well.

Please provide a way to allow action developers to get a sense of how many times their action was invoked per day, how many unique repositories (or workflows) are invoking their action every day, number of successful runs vs number of failures, etc. without giving out any personally identifiable information.

This would tell the developers how much of an impact their action is making and will motivate us to keep it alive and updated.

2 Likes
#2

One idea is to use the GitHub search feature for your action and select Code and yaml.

e.g. https://github.com/search?l=YAML&q=repo-sync%2Fgithub-sync&type=Code

You can even create a badge with this count to display on your README.

2 Likes
#3

Thank you! That’s a good start. This obviously won’t include private repositories. Also, code search will not give an indication of whether the action is actually being used actively and if it is, how many times it ran, etc. But it’s still a good preliminary indicator.

#4

To get how many times it’s run, we are currently looking at https://github.com/orgs/repo-sync/packages/container/package/github-sync which shows how many times our docker image is pulled.

image
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I agree it’s not ideal but nonetheless a way to see usage without adding analytics during runtime : )

1 Like
#5

Ah Interesting! Helpful for Docker based actions. My Action is TypeScript based though.

#6

How would you create such a badge?

#7

https://badgen.net/#runkit Write an endpoint that returns a json badgen supports.