odnar-dev / useful-forks.github.io

Improving GitHub's Forks list discoverability through automatic filtering. The project offers a website and a Chrome extension.

Useful Forks

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Adding a sorted list of starred forks to the GitHub forks page. Results are filtered out if there were never any commits pushed on the main branch since the fork was created.

This is meant to help increase the discoverability of useful forks of open-source projects.

Some times, a project might be abandoned, or someone had a different idea of how it should be implemented... and when you go looking for those interesting forks, you find yourself searching through potentially hundreds of them. This tool is here to help you discover the hidden jewels you were looking for!

Table of Content

• Releases
  • Online tool
  • Chrome extension (WIP)
  • refined-github
• How it works
• Contributing
• Credits

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Releases

The project is released as:

1. A website: great for people that just want to use this tool every now and then.
2. A Chrome extension: has the advantage of always performing the search whenever you open a project's GitHub Forks page.
3. A feature in refined-github

Online tool

The project is available online thanks to GitHub Pages.

You can query repository directly with the URL. Here is an example: https://useful-forks.github.io/?repository=kotcrab/vis-ui

Chrome extension (WIP)

Not published yet. If you want to install it:

1. Clone this repository
2. Change the script file so that GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN's value is that of an Access Token
3. Go to the chrome://extensions URL
4. Enable Developer mode (switch at the top-right)
5. Click Load unpacked (button at the top-left)
6. Select the plugin folder

Once it's activated, the extension will automatically trigger itself whenever you open a Fork page, as shown by the GIF below:

refined-github

refined-github is an ensemble of tools and tweaks aimed at improving your GitHub experience.

useful-forks is part of the dozens of features provided. In that context, it appears as a button which redirects you to the useful-forks website:

How it works

This Activity Diagram (UML) should clarify a bit the inner-workings of the algorithm, and why it may some times require so many API calls.

Contributing

If you want to help, the structure of the repo is rather simple. In terms of folders:

• website contains the website
• plugin contains the Chrome Extension

Website instructions

To run the website locally, you will need:

• NodeJS (suggested v14.15+)
• NPM (suggested v6.14+)

Bring a terminal to the website folder and execute npm install, and then npm run dev.

Whenever you want to test changes to the src/queries-logic.js file, you will need to re-execute npm run dev for dist/main.js to recompile.

Credits

• Thanks to raeleus for his design of the logo!
• Thanks to jkunstwald for allowing me to apply the MIT license to what has been expanded from his own initial work. Here is a list of the improvements that were made:
  • Recursive search of all sub-forks
  • GitHub API's Watchers value is bugged so it was removed
  • Implement authenticated requests to the GitHub API (which increases the limit of calls)
  • Added some minimal feedback for certain edge-cases
  • Created an actual website for the feature
  • Position the chrome extension's results where they won't move the other links of the page
• Thanks to star-history's open-source website which I adapted for this project