GitHub CLI Commands for Pull Request

This document provides a guide for developers to run GitHub-related analyses using the CLI commands available in the software-metrics-machine project. Each command is categorized by its purpose and functionality.

Pull Requests

Fetch PRs

./run-cli.sh prs fetch

Option	Description	Example
Start date	Fetches PRs created after a date.	--start-date=2025-01-01
End date	Fetches PRs created before a date.	--end-date=2025-12-31
Filters	Allows to pass in filters directly to the GitHub API	--raw-filters=state=open
Force	By default a file is stored with the rerieved data to avoid refetching it again. However, using this parameter bypass this cache.	--force=true

Filtering the data fetch from PRs by date is done logically while fetching the data, this is not a feature that GitHub API provides.

Data quality

Once data is fetched, you can run a summary of the data using the following command:

./run-cli.sh prs summary

It will print a summary of the PRs fetched, including:

• Total PRs (total_prs): The total number of pull requests.
• First PR (first_pr): Details of the first pull request.
• Last PR (last_pr): Details of the last pull request.
• Merged PRs (merged_prs): The number of pull requests that were merged.
• Closed PRs (closed_prs): The number of pull requests that were closed but not merged.
• PRs Without Conclusion (without_conclusion): The number of pull requests that are neither closed nor merged.
• Unique Authors (unique_authors): The number of unique authors who created pull requests.
• Unique Labels (unique_labels): The number of unique labels used across pull requests.
• Labels (labels): A list of all unique labels used in pull requests.

View Average Review Time by Author

./run-cli.sh prs view-average-review-time

Option	Description	Example
Labels	Filters PRs by the labels attached to it.	--labels=my_label,anothe_label
Start date	Fetches PRs created after a date.	--start-date=2025-01-01
End date	Fetches PRs created before a date.	--end-date=2025-12-31
Limit	If the list is too big --top will show only the top x results from the list.	--top=10
File	The name of the file to store the generated chart	--out-file=my_chart.png or --out-file=subfolder/my_chart.png
Step	Step defines the pace in which the data is fetched. It helps to mitigate the rate limits in the GitHub API	--step-by=day

View PRs by Author

./run-cli.sh prs view-by-author

View Summary

./run-cli.sh prs view-summary

View Average of PRs Open by Time

./run-cli.sh prs view-average-open-time