🚀 Health Analyzer PoC

Reducing Risk in Open Source Adoption

🧭 Purpose

The health-analyzer-poc is a proof-of-concept for evaluating the health, sustainability, and reusability of software projects hosted in Git repositories. The goal is to provide data-driven insights for stakeholders such as maintainers, contributors, and decision-makers.

flowchart LR
  classDef card fill:#f9f9f9,stroke:#bbb,stroke-width:1px,color:#333,rx:6,ry:6

  H["🧠 Project Health<br><br>Is the project alive and active?<br>Track contributor activity, issue responsiveness, and release cadence to avoid dead or stagnant code."]~~~
  S["🌱 Sustainability<br><br>Will the project survive long-term?<br>Detect risks like abandonment, low bus factor, and missing governance to ensure continuity."]~~~
  R["🔁 Reusability<br><br>Can we safely build on this?<br>Assess documentation, modularity, and test coverage to support confident reuse."]

  class H,S,R card

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⚙️ How It Works

The analyzer can be built to support two seperate operational modes:

1. Full-Stack Mode

• Leverages selected CHAOSS metrics and 8knot for continuous monitoring of repositories.
• Traditional "Dashboarding" approach with persistent database backend.
• ⚠️ Requires a larger infrastructure setup (e.g., persistent storage, dashboard hosting) and cost.

2. Ephemeral Mode

• Runs as a containerized job (e.g., via GitHub Actions or CI/CD pipelines).
• Pulls data from the Forge (e.g. github API) API and generates a report (Markdown or HTML).
• Ideal for on-demand evaluations with zero infrastructure overhead.
• Cold be built to be interoperable with OpenCode Badges

📦 Outputs

• Health Reports: Markdown/HTML summaries of key metrics.
• Badges: Optional visual indicators for embedding in READMEs in forges.
• Dashboards: (Full-stack mode only) Interactive views of project trends.
• Search and rating of software solutions across forges.

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🛠️ Technologies Used

• GitHub API – for retrieving repository data.
• GitLab API – for interacting with GitLab-hosted repositories.
• Forgejo API – for accessing Forgejo repository data.
• CHAOSS metrics – for assessing open source community health.
• 8knot – dashboard tool for visualizing CHAOSS metrics.
• Kubernetes – for production setup of containerized workloads.
• Containerized development setup - Podman – daemonless, rootless container engine.
• CI/CD platforms:
  • GitHub Actions – automation for ephemeral mode.
  • GitLab CI/CD – pipelines for GitLab-hosted projects.
  • Forgejo Runners – self-hosted runners for Forgejo instances.

🤝 Contributing

We welcome ideas, feedback, and suggestions!

If you’d like to contribute, please use the Issue Tracker to:

• Suggest new metrics or features
• Share use cases or integration ideas
• Discuss ideas for implementations and code.

📝 You’ll need a GitHub account to create or comment on issues.

We’re especially interested in contributions that help make open source reuse safer and more transparent for non-technical stakeholders.