Linguist
This library is used on GitHub.com to detect blob languages, ignore binary or vendored files, suppress generated files in diffs, and generate language breakdown graphs.
Documentation
Installation
Install the gem:
gem install github-linguist
Dependencies
Linguist is a Ruby library so you will need a recent version of Ruby installed.
There are known problems with the macOS/Xcode supplied version of Ruby that causes problems installing some of the dependencies.
Accordingly, we highly recommend you install a version of Ruby using Homebrew, rbenv, rvm, ruby-build, asdf or other packaging system, before attempting to install Linguist and the dependencies.
Linguist uses charlock_holmes for character encoding and rugged for libgit2 bindings for Ruby.
These components have their own dependencies.
- charlock_holmes
- rugged
You may need to install missing dependencies before you can install Linguist.
For example, on macOS with Homebrew:
brew install cmake pkg-config icu4c
On Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake pkg-config libicu-dev zlib1g-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev ruby-dev
Usage
Application usage
Linguist can be used in your application as follows:
require 'rugged'
require 'linguist'
repo = Rugged::Repository.new('.')
project = Linguist::Repository.new(repo, repo.head.target_id)
project.language #=> "Ruby"
project.languages #=> { "Ruby" => 119387 }
Command line usage
The github-linguist executable operates in two distinct modes:
- Git Repository mode - Analyzes an entire Git repository (when given a directory path or no path)
- Single file mode - Analyzes a specific file (when given a file path)
Git Repository
A repository's languages stats can be assessed from the command line using the github-linguist executable.
Without any options, github-linguist will output the language breakdown by percentage and file size.
cd /path-to-repository
github-linguist
You can try running github-linguist on the root directory in this repository itself:
$ github-linguist
66.84% 264519 Ruby
24.68% 97685 C
6.57% 25999 Go
1.29% 5098 Lex
0.32% 1257 Shell
0.31% 1212 Dockerfile
Additional options
--rev REV
The --rev REV flag will change the git revision being analyzed to any gitrevisions(1) compatible revision you specify.
This is useful to analyze the makeup of a repo as of a certain tag, or in a certain branch.
For example, here is the popular Jekyll open source project.
$ github-linguist jekyll
70.64% 709959 Ruby
23.04% 231555 Gherkin
3.80% 38178 JavaScript
1.19% 11943 HTML
0.79% 7900 Shell
0.23% 2279 Dockerfile
0.13% 1344 Earthly
0.10% 1019 CSS
0.06% 606 SCSS
0.02% 234 CoffeeScript
0.01% 90 Hack
And here is Jekyll's published website, from the gh-pages branch inside their repository.
$ github-linguist jekyll --rev origin/gh-pages
100.00% 2568354 HTML
--breakdown
The --breakdown or -b flag will additionally show the breakdown of files by language.
You can try running github-linguist on the root directory in this repository itself:
$ github-linguist --breakdown
66.84% 264519 Ruby
24.68% 97685 C
6.57% 25999 Go
1.29% 5098 Lex
0.32% 1257 Shell
0.31% 1212 Dockerfile
Ruby:
Gemfile
Rakefile
bin/git-linguist
bin/github-linguist
ext/linguist/extconf.rb
github-linguist.gemspec
lib/linguist.rb
…
--strategies
The --strategies or -s flag will show the language detection strategy used for each file. This is useful for understanding how Linguist determined the language of specific files. Note that unless the --json flag is specified, this flag will set the --breakdown flag implicitly.
You can try running github-linguist on the root directory in this repository itself with the strategies flag:
$ github-linguist --breakdown --strategies
66.84% 264519 Ruby
24.68% 97685 C
6.57% 25999 Go
1.29% 5098 Lex
0.32% 1257 Shell
0.31% 1212 Dockerfile
Ruby:
Gemfile [Filename]
Rakefile [Filename]
bin/git-linguist [Extension]
bin/github-linguist [Extension]
lib/linguist.rb [Extension]
…
If a file's language is affected by .gitattributes, the strategy will show the original detection method along with a note indicating whether the gitattributes setting changed the result or confirmed it.
For instance, if you had the following .gitattributes overrides in your repo:
*.ts linguist-language=JavaScript
*.js linguist-language=JavaScript
the output of Linguist would be something like this:
100.00% 217 JavaScript
JavaScript:
demo.ts [Heuristics (overridden by .gitattributes)]
demo.js [Extension (confirmed by .gitattributes)]
--json
The --json or -j flag output the data into JSON format.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
