Download count of GitHub release in R

Question

I am trying to get the download count of a public repo using the GitHub API and R v3.1.2. Using the public samples repo from Google I have the following:

library(jsonlite)
library(httr)

url <- "https://api.github.com/repos/googlesamples/google-services/downloads"
response <- GET(url)
json <- content(response, "text")
json <- fromJSON(json)

print(json)

However, I noticed that json returns an empty list. Is it because there are no releases in this public repo? The goal is to determine how many times this repo has been downloaded by the public -- or any other public repo for that matter. Is this even possible?

Answer 1

The old Github download counts have been deprecated and don't seem to work any longer. You can get download counts from releases, but it does take a little bit of manipulation:

library(jsonlite)
library(httr)

url <- "https://api.github.com/repos/allenluce/mmap-object/releases"
response <- GET(url)
json <- content(response, "text")
json <- fromJSON(json)
print(Reduce("+", lapply(json$assets, function(x) sum(x$download_count))))

There are some caveats:

1. The repo must have releases.
2. The releases must have files
3. There is no API to obtain the count of people who have cloned your repo.

Github allows you to count the number of released files that have been downloaded, but that's about it. The google-services repo that you use as an example has neither releases nor files!