Code · gchq · UK Public Sector GitHub Observatory

Language figures come from GitHub's own per-repository byte counts, which measure source rather than a single headline label. File counts and repository sizes come from the mirrors themselves. The two tell different stories, and the difference is the point.

The codebase

languages in use

157.1 MB of source

40.5k

files at HEAD

across every analysed repository

0 B

on disk as mirrors

full history, every branch and tag

648.1 MB

largest repository

stroom-docs

What stands out

One archived repository holds 29% of all the bytes.

stroom-docs is 648.1 MB of git - a 2013 static snapshot of www.gov.uk, not source code. It single-handedly makes HTML the largest language by volume (3% of all source bytes). Any size or language statistic that does not exclude it is measuring an archive, not a codebase.

Sizes here are GitHub's reported figures.

This organisation was harvested with blobless partial clones, which fetch every commit and file path but not file contents, so there is no local size to measure against. Checked elsewhere in this dataset against 1,526 fully mirrored repositories, GitHub's reported size is accurate to within about six percent.

Ruby is the house language, but its share is falling.

Ruby is the primary language of 0% of archived repositories but only 0% of live ones. Python, Go, TypeScript and HCL have taken the difference - the signature of a shift from monolithic Rails publishing apps toward data pipelines, infrastructure-as-code and platform tooling.

Most repositories are small; a handful are enormous.

42% of repositories are under a megabyte of git data. The estate is not a monolith - it is a very long tail of small services, gems and prototypes around a few large publishing applications.

Languages, two ways

By volume of source

Bytes of code. Dominated by archived static HTML.

By number of repositories

How many repositories name each language as their primary one. A better guide to what engineers actually work in.

Live estate versus archive

The same language ranking, split by whether the repository is still active. The shift is the clearest signal of technical direction in the whole dataset.

Active repositories

Archived repositories

Scale

Repository size distribution

Git data per repository, log-ish buckets.

Commits against files

Each circle is a repository, sized by number of distinct authors. Both axes are logarithmic. The diagonal band is the normal relationship between codebase size and churn; outliers above it are long-lived apps with heavy iteration, below it are dumps and imports.

The shape of a repository

Directory layout is the cheapest reliable signal of what a repository actually is. app/ with config/ and spec/ is a Rails application; src/ with test/ is Java or Node. Counted by how many repositories contain each top-level directory at HEAD.

Most common top-level directories

Most common file extensions

By total file count across the estate.

The twenty largest repositories

Repository	Language	Git size	Commits	Files	Status
stroom-docs	Shell	648.1 MB	2,982	1,392	active
Gaffer	Java	233.3 MB	13,578	2,621	archived
stroom	Java	227.9 MB	23,005	13,167	active
Bailo	TypeScript	199.4 MB	16,239	1,356	active
stroom-k8s-operator	Go	171.5 MB	246	132	active
CyberChef	JavaScript	145.7 MB	7,976	984	active
sleeper	Java	81.5 MB	35,001	3,600	active
gaffer-tools	Python	78.4 MB	4,328	155	archived
coreax	Python	59.6 MB	5,810	196	active
gaffer-doc	-	54.0 MB	1,576	138	archived
stroom-kubernetes-operator	Go	51.4 MB	1	130	active
hbase-common-shaded	-	29.3 MB	11	11	active
stroom-proxy	Java	27.4 MB	105	396	active
BoilingFrogs	-	23.1 MB	23	3	active
annchor	Python	21.7 MB	161	57	active
stroom-analytic-demo	Jupyter Notebook	20.8 MB	156	172	active
hadoop-common-shaded	Shell	20.1 MB	29	13	active
stroom-visualisations-dev	JavaScript	17.6 MB	708	553	active
hadoop-hdfs-shaded	Shell	16.0 MB	25	13	active
gaffer-experimental	Java	14.5 MB	6,151	449	archived