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Is there any way to get how many times a git repository has been cloned or downloaded from github? I was just curious as I found other statistics such as commit times lines of codes cam be generated using: http://gitstats.sourceforge.net/ but I did not find how to check for clone/download count.

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up vote 14 down vote accepted

Cloning is a read-only operation, the original repository isn't modified. There is no way you can pull statistics for data that simply isn't tracked.

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Well, it would be possible to track it outside of git, by logging at the level of the transport mechanism. For example, I'm pretty sure gitolite logs would provide enough information to deduce clones (although I think they might not be distinguishable from fetching all refs a different way? don't have any to look at here). But of course, you don't have access to that kind of thing from github, even if it exists. –  Jefromi Jul 15 '11 at 0:49
Never mind that clones are full repositories that can themselves be cloned. Seeing how many times a particular instance of a repository has been cloned wouldn't be useful for figuring out how many people have cloned it universally. –  meagar Jul 16 '11 at 18:20
Yeah, it certainly wouldn't ever be a reliable statistic, but for example, I could see an open source project being curious to at least have an order of magnitude estimate of how many people might be building from development master instead of stable snapshots. –  Jefromi Jul 16 '11 at 22:08
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