GHTorrent: Github´s data from a firehose

A common requirement of many empirical software engineering studies is the acquisition and curation of data from software repositories. During the last few years, GitHub has emerged as a popular project hosting, mirroring and collaboration platform. GitHub provides an extensive REST API, which enables researchers to retrieve both the commits to the projects´ repositories and events generated through user actions on project resources. GHTorrent aims to create a scalable off line mirror of GitHub´s event streams and persistent data, and offer it to the research community as a service. In this paper, we present the project´s design and initial implementation and demonstrate how the provided datasets can be queried and processed.