emberlens

emberlens is a Go CLI for repository analytics on GitHub and GitLab.

It is designed for terminal-first usage:

• compact default output
• one summary block plus one useful table
• extra detail only when flags ask for it
• flat per-run YAML snapshots under test-run-N/

Today Emberlens covers three analytics domains:

• people analytics
• issue analytics
• discovery analytics

What You Can Do

People analytics

Command	What it shows	Command flags
contributors	all-time contributor leaderboard	-max-pages
active-contributors	contributors active in a recent commit window	-since, -commit-pages
maintainers	likely maintainers from contribution weight and optional team signals	-min-contributions, -top-percent, -signal-weight, -signal-pages, -signals, -max-pages

Issue analytics

Command	What it shows	Command flags
issues	issue analytics selected by -view	-view, -since, -period, -unit, -sort, -stale-for, -comment-pages, -max-pages

-view value	What it shows
counts	open and closed issue inventory plus recent totals
new	new issue volume over time
active	issue activity over time based on last update
closed	closed issue volume plus average resolution summary
backlog	oldest open issues in the backlog
age	open issue age distribution
resolution	resolution duration for recently closed issues
response	first maintainer response latency
participants	issues with the most distinct participants
abandoned	stale open issues with no recent activity

Discovery analytics

Command	What it shows	Command flags
discover	issue patterns that are hard to spot directly in the web UI	-view, -since, -min-age, -min-comments, -min-participants, -sort, -comment-pages, -max-pages

-view value	What it shows
untriaged	open issues old enough to deserve triage but still without maintainer response
needs-maintainer	open issues with meaningful discussion but still no maintainer engagement
hotspots	recently active open issues with concentrated discussion and participants

Platform Support

Feature	GitHub	GitLab
People analytics	yes	yes
Issue analytics	yes	yes
User profiles	yes	yes
Self-hosted instances	GitHub.com only	yes via -gitlab-url

Use -platform github or -platform gitlab. The default is github.

Install

go install ./cmd/emberlens

Then:

emberlens help

For a local binary instead:

go build -o emberlens ./cmd/emberlens

API Tokens

GitHub:

export GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

GitLab:

export GITLAB_TOKEN=glpat-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

You can also pass a token directly:

emberlens contributors -repo golang/go -token "$GITHUB_TOKEN"
emberlens contributors -repo mygroup/myproject -platform gitlab -token "$GITLAB_TOKEN"

For self-hosted GitLab:

emberlens contributors -repo mygroup/myproject -platform gitlab -gitlab-url https://gitlab.example.com

Output Model

Default table output is intentionally trimmed:

1. banner
2. summary stats
3. compact table
4. footer with elapsed time, truncation note, useful flags, and report path

Examples:

emberlens contributors -repo golang/go
emberlens issues -repo chaoss/augur -view new -since 720h -period week
emberlens issues -repo chaoss/augur -view backlog -stale-for 1440h
emberlens discover -repo chaoss/augur -view untriaged -min-age 168h

To reveal more detail:

emberlens issues -repo chaoss/augur -view resolution -verbose -limit 10
emberlens issues -repo chaoss/augur -view participants -output json | jq
emberlens maintainers -repo keploy/keploy -signals -profiles -limit 0
emberlens discover -repo chaoss/augur -view hotspots -since 336h -min-comments 5 -min-participants 3

Key behavior:

• default row cap is -limit 20
• use -limit 0 to show all rows
• -verbose switches from table view to card view
• -output json emits the dataset directly
• saved reports capture the same trimmed result shown by the run

Common Flags

All commands support:

Flag	Default	Description
-repo owner/repo	required	target repository
`-platform github	gitlab`	github
-token <token>	env fallback	API token
-gitlab-url <url>	https://gitlab.com	GitLab base URL
`-output table	json`	table
-verbose	off	detailed card layout
-limit N	20	max rows to render, 0 = all
-profiles	off	fetch full user profiles when supported
-no-color	off	disable ANSI color
-timeout <duration>	2m	request timeout
-no-report	off	skip YAML report output
-report-dir <dir>	emberlens-reports	report directory

Command Examples

People

emberlens contributors -repo golang/go -max-pages 5
emberlens active-contributors -repo golang/go -since 168h -commit-pages 10
emberlens maintainers -repo keploy/keploy -signals -signal-pages 5

Issues

emberlens issues -repo chaoss/augur
emberlens issues -repo chaoss/augur -view new -since 720h -period week
emberlens issues -repo chaoss/augur -view active -since 720h -period day
emberlens issues -repo chaoss/augur -view closed -since 720h -period week -unit days
emberlens issues -repo chaoss/augur -view backlog -stale-for 720h -sort age
emberlens issues -repo chaoss/augur -view age
emberlens issues -repo chaoss/augur -view resolution -since 1440h -unit days -sort duration
emberlens issues -repo chaoss/augur -view response -since 720h -comment-pages 2 -unit hours
emberlens issues -repo chaoss/augur -view participants -since 720h -comment-pages 2
emberlens issues -repo chaoss/augur -view abandoned -stale-for 720h -comment-pages 2

Discovery

emberlens discover -repo chaoss/augur -view untriaged -min-age 168h
emberlens discover -repo chaoss/augur -view needs-maintainer -min-age 168h -min-comments 3 -min-participants 3
emberlens discover -repo chaoss/augur -view hotspots -since 336h -min-comments 5 -min-participants 3

Issue Analytics Notes

The issue commands are intentionally conservative and terminal-friendly:

• GitHub pull requests are excluded from issue analytics
• issues -view active uses the issue updated_at timestamp
• issues -view response measures first maintainer comment after issue creation
• GitHub maintainer response uses author associations like OWNER, MEMBER, and COLLABORATOR
• GitLab maintainer response is inferred from project member access levels
• issues -view abandoned uses inactivity since the last issue update

Discovery Analytics Notes

The discover command is designed for patterns that usually take multiple manual sorts and filters to uncover:

• discover -view untriaged highlights open issues past a minimum age with no maintainer response
• discover -view needs-maintainer filters for discussion-heavy open issues that still lack maintainer engagement
• discover -view hotspots ranks recently updated open issues by participation and comment concentration
• GitHub and GitLab maintainer detection uses the same author-association logic as issue response analytics

Reports

Every run writes a YAML snapshot unless -no-report is set.

Reports are flat, not grouped by command:

emberlens-reports/
  test-run-0/
    report.yaml
  test-run-1/
    report.yaml

Example report:

version: v2
name: test-run-0
command: "emberlens issues -repo chaoss/augur -view=new -since=720h -period=week"
repo: chaoss/augur
status: success
total: 5
created_at: "2026-03-16T12:00:00Z"
time_taken: "842ms"
result:
  title: Issues opened
  summary:
    - label: New issues
      value: "29"
  columns:
    - key: period
      label: PERIOD
    - key: count
      label: NEW ISSUES
  records:
    - period: "2026-02-10"
      count: 4

Notes:

• reports mirror the rendered dataset after -limit is applied
• each run gets the next test-run-N directory
• use -report-dir to change the base folder

Extending Emberlens

Every command implements the Subcommand interface and returns an analysis.Dataset.

type myCmd struct{}

func (c *myCmd) Name() string        { return "my-command" }
func (c *myCmd) Description() string { return "Does something useful" }
func (c *myCmd) RegisterFlags(fs *flag.FlagSet) {}

func (c *myCmd) Execute(rc *RunContext) (analysis.Dataset, error) {
	return analysis.Dataset{
		Title: "My metric",
		Columns: []analysis.Column{
			{Key: "name", Label: "NAME"},
		},
		Records: []map[string]any{
			{"name": "example"},
		},
	}, nil
}

Register it in NewRunner():

r.Register(&myCmd{})

The runner handles:

• shared flag parsing
• output rendering
• card and table modes
• JSON output
• run reports
• summary footer

Current Gaps Compared To Augur

Emberlens now covers people and issue analytics, but it still does not include major Augur domains:

• pull request and review analytics
• releases and cadence
• repo summary metrics like stars, forks, watchers, and languages
• code churn, lines-of-code, and complexity metrics
• dependency, license, and SBOM analysis
• historical storage, repo groups, and dashboard-style APIs

The detailed comparison is in docs/augur-gap-report.md.