Backstage

This repo now includes a production-ready Repo Insights plugin that surfaces repository activity metrics (volatility, bus factor, and contribution trends) for any public GitHub project configured in app-config.yaml.

Getting started

yarn install
yarn start

Once both the frontend (localhost:3000) and backend (localhost:7007) are running you will see a Repo Insights entry in the sidebar that links to /repo-insights.

Configuring Repo Insights

Add the following block to your configuration (already present in app-config.yaml and app-config.local.yaml):

repoInsights:
  repoUrl: https://github.com/backstage/backstage # required
  githubTokenEnv: GITHUB_TOKEN # optional, default GITHUB_TOKEN

• repoUrl must point to a public GitHub repository in the form https://github.com/owner/name.
• githubTokenEnv lets you point at an environment variable containing a Personal Access Token to increase GitHub rate limits. The plugin also works without a token (with lower limits).

Backend behavior

• Fetches commit metadata and file-level changes via Octokit with up to 10 concurrent detail requests and an upper bound of 2,500 commits per window.
• Caches each (repo, lookback) response in-memory for 15 minutes (configurable via code) to keep response times under ~5 seconds once warmed. reaching the commit cap; the frontend shows a warning banner in that case.
• Emits structured logs through @backstage/backend-common so you can trace cache hits/misses and API failures.

Frontend behavior

• Volatility and bus factor tables are sortable and link directly to the GitHub file on the default branch.
• Contribution trends include a monthly global line chart plus a per-directory bar chart comparing the most recent month to the previous month, powered by Recharts.

Limitations

• Only supports repositories hosted on github.com.
• Data is cached in-memory inside the backend process. If you run multiple backend replicas they maintain independent caches.