github api to know work breakdown for repository - github

Question

For our organization, we want to plot metrics of new work (new changes in code), and rework (changing existing code) happening across the repository. Is there any GitHub API to get that info?

Answer 1

Is there any GitHub API to get that info?
No direct native API.
You would need the GitHub commits API for that, which you can query using the GitHub CLI gh (to be installed first):
gh api \
-H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
/repos/OWNER/REPO/commits
For each commit, you can get a commit, which will include:
gh api \
-H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
/repos/OWNER/REPO/commits/REF
"stats": {
"additions": 104,
"deletions": 4,
"total": 108
},
"files": [
{
"filename": "file1.txt",
"additions": 10,
"deletions": 2,
"changes": 12,
...
That should be enough to determine if this is new work or rework.
Depending on the depth of the repository history, that might mean such a script could not scale if there is too many commit.
But it could work if you limit the analysis to a range of commits.