GitHub Proxy Server: A tool for supporting massive data collection on GitHub
Hudson Silva Borges, Marco Tulio Valente
TL;DR
The paper tackles the challenge of mass data collection from GitHub under strict API limits and abuse-detection constraints. It introduces GitHub Proxy Server, a platform- and language-agnostic proxy that centralizes multi-token management, request orchestration, and load balancing to improve mining throughput. Through integration experiments with libraries like octokit.js and PyGithub, and a performance study comparing direct API access to proxy-assisted collection, the approach demonstrates meaningful reductions in total collection time, especially when using multiple tokens. The proposed tool has practical impact for researchers and developers by simplifying large-scale data gathering while respecting GitHub’s usage policies, with future work on automatic token provisioning and adaptive parameter tuning.
Abstract
GitHub is the most popular social coding platform and widely used by developers and organizations to host their open-source projects around the world. Besides that, the platform has a web API that allow developers collect information from public repositories hosted on it. However, collecting massive amount of data from GitHub can be very challenging due to existing restrictions and abuse detection mechanisms. In this work, we present a tool, called GitHub Proxy Server, which abstracts such complexities into a tool that is independent on operational system and programming language. We show that, using the proposed tool, it is possible to improve the performance of GitHub mining tasks without any additional complexities.