Comparison table for open-source self-hosted commenting servers (lisakov.com/projects/open-source-comments/). Inspired by staticsitegenerators.net.

• The data are stored in data.yaml. This file is edited manually.

• get_data.py reads the GitHub and GitLab repositories from data.yaml, fetches the current repository metadata and latest commit through their APIs, then updates data.yaml for the following:

  • displayed stars from the repository with the higher star count,
  • combined star growth in the latest N days,
  • latest commit date,
  • creation date,
  • license.

• Historical repository-derived data are stored in apigh/history.json. It keeps only value changes for the fields used by the page (stars, stars_total, stars_github, stars_gitlab, open_issues, created, license, last_commit) instead of storing raw API responses for every repository every day.

• yaml_2_js.py converts data.yaml to data.js (it defines two variables — osc_data and cols).

• index.html reads data.js and parses it to the html table using datatables.js.

• plot-stars.py reads apigh/history.json, plots stars vs. time for selected projects, and writes stars-v-date.svg.

• The webpage is updated daily via cron. updater.sh runs get_data.py, md_to_html.py, yaml_2_js.py, and plot-stars.py, then deploys the updated files and pushes the repository.

Install Python dependencies with:

python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Clone the repo and open index.html in your browser. To change it, edit index.md and run python3 md_to_html.py. It will overwrite existing index.html.

After modifying data.yaml, run python3 yaml_2_js.py. It will update the data.js file.

• Check and add the information to make the table useful. I would appreciate adding a missing demo.

• Improve the python code.

• get_data.py: retry transient repository API errors.

• Show column descriptions on mouse over.

• Where do I find a number of opened and closed issues? For example, https://api.github.com/users/posativ/isso has open_issues_count and open_issues, both equal to 131, whereas there are 110 issues and 21 PR.

• apigh/<date> folders store a lot of information which is never used. Need to extract only needed info from the files and remove the rest.

• Plot stars vs. time for several top commenting systems. Update the plot daily automatically.

• Get rid of yaml, convert data.yaml to data.json

Contributions are welcome. Fork the repo and send PR, submit an issue, or leave a comment at the website.