Repo Traffic Views

Self-contained snapshots of GitHub repository traffic, with a generated badge. No third-party services, no external uptime dependency.

Why

GitHub retains only 14 days of traffic data. Once a day ages out of that window it is gone permanently, and there is no way to recover it.

This repository runs a cron job that appends the current window to a CSV under version control. History accumulates indefinitely and is owned outright, so it cannot be lost to a service shutting down or rate-limiting its free tier.

What it measures

Repository traffic views — visits to your repo pages, aggregated across every repo you own.

This is not profile page views. GitHub exposes no API for profile README views, so any counter claiming to report them is using an external tracking pixel. That is the dependency this repository exists to avoid.

How it works

.github/workflows/action.yml runs every 12 hours:

1. Check out the repo using VIEWS_TOKEN.
2. Install R plus curl and jsonlite from Posit Package Manager binaries.
3. Run scripts/collect-views.R.
4. Commit data/views.csv and svg/views-badge.svg if either changed.

The script lists every repo you own, reads /repos/{owner}/{repo}/traffic/views for each, and upserts the results by (repo, date).

Upserting rather than appending makes reruns idempotent — the cron fires four times a day inside the same 14-day window, so rows are overwritten, never duplicated. It also lets late corrections from GitHub heal earlier snapshots.

Files

Path	Purpose
scripts/collect-views.R	Fetch, upsert, write badge
data/views.csv	Accumulated daily history
svg/views-badge.svg	Generated cumulative badge
.github/workflows/	Scheduled workflow

Data schema

data/views.csv holds one row per repo per day:

repo,date,views,uniques
stufield/helpr,2026-08-18,25,5

Setup

Create a personal access token and store it as the repository secret VIEWS_TOKEN under Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions.

The traffic API requires push access even for public repos, so a read-only token returns 403. Minimum scope is public_repo; use repo to include private repositories.

The same token authenticates the commit back to this repository, so no separate push credential is needed.

Running locally

Rscript --vanilla scripts/collect-views.R

Functions are testable in isolation — main() only fires under Rscript, not when the file is sourced:

source("scripts/collect-views.R")
views <- read_views("data/views.csv")
sum(views$views)

collect_views() takes a fetch argument, so it can be driven from a mock payload without touching the network.

Using the badge

<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stufield/repo-views/master/svg/views-badge.svg" alt="Repo Views" />

Use raw.githubusercontent.com. A /blob/ URL serves an HTML page, not an image, and will not render.

Limitations

• GitHub proxies and caches README images, so the displayed count lags the 12-hour cron. The data is current; the display is not.
• Repos without push access are logged and skipped rather than failing the run.
• Only owned repos are collected — no forks or org repos you merely contribute to.