Language Savant. If your repository's language is being reported incorrectly, send us a pull request!
Language Savant. If your repository's language is being reported incorrectly, send us a pull request!
This library is used on GitHub.com to detect blob languages, ignore binary or vendored files, suppress generated files in diffs, and generate language breakdown graphs.
Install the gem:
gem install github-linguist
Linguist is a Ruby library so you will need a recent version of Ruby installed.
There are known problems with the macOS/Xcode supplied version of Ruby that causes problems installing some of the dependencies.
Accordingly, we highly recommend you install a version of Ruby using Homebrew, rbenv, rvm, ruby-build, asdf or other packaging system, before attempting to install Linguist and the dependencies.
Linguist uses charlock_holmes for character encoding and rugged for libgit2 bindings for Ruby.
These components have their own dependencies.
You may need to install missing dependencies before you can install Linguist. For example, on macOS with Homebrew:
brew install cmake pkg-config icu4c
On Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake pkg-config libicu-dev zlib1g-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev ruby-dev
Linguist can be used in your application as follows:
require 'rugged'
require 'linguist'
repo = Rugged::Repository.new('.')
project = Linguist::Repository.new(repo, repo.head.target_id)
project.language #=> "Ruby"
project.languages #=> { "Ruby" => 119387 }
The github-linguist executable operates in two distinct modes:
A repository's languages stats can be assessed from the command line using the github-linguist executable.
Without any options, github-linguist will output the language breakdown by percentage and file size.
cd /path-to-repository
github-linguist
You can try running github-linguist on the root directory in this repository itself:
$ github-linguist
66.84% 264519 Ruby
24.68% 97685 C
6.57% 25999 Go
1.29% 5098 Lex
0.32% 1257 Shell
0.31% 1212 Dockerfile
--rev REV
The --rev REV flag will change the git revision being analyzed to any gitrevisions(1) compatible revision you specify.
This is useful to analyze the makeup of a repo as of a certain tag, or in a certain branch.
For example, here is the popular Jekyll open source project.
$ github-linguist jekyll
70.64% 709959 Ruby
23.04% 231555 Gherkin
3.80% 38178 JavaScript
1.19% 11943 HTML
0.79% 7900 Shell
0.23% 2279 Dockerfile
0.13% 1344 Earthly
0.10% 1019 CSS
0.06% 606 SCSS
0.02% 234 CoffeeScript
0.01% 90 Hack
And here is Jekyll's published website, from the gh-pages branch inside their repository.
$ github-linguist jekyll --rev origin/gh-pages
100.00% 2568354 HTML
--breakdown
The --breakdown or -b flag will additionally show the breakdown of files by language.
You can try running github-linguist on the root directory in this repository itself:
$ github-linguist --breakdown
66.84% 264519 Ruby
24.68% 97685 C
6.57% 25999 Go
1.29% 5098 Lex
0.32% 1257 Shell
0.31% 1212 Dockerfile
Ruby:
Gemfile
Rakefile
bin/git-linguist
bin/github-linguist
ext/linguist/extconf.rb
github-linguist.gemspec
lib/linguist.rb
…
--strategies
The --strategies or -s flag will show the language detection strategy used for each file. This is useful for understanding how Linguist determined the language of specific files. Note that unless the --json flag is specified, this flag will set the --breakdown flag implicitly.
You can try running github-linguist on the root directory in this repository itself with the strategies flag:
$ github-linguist --breakdown --strategies
66.84% 264519 Ruby
24.68% 97685 C
6.57% 25999 Go
1.29% 5098 Lex
0.32% 1257 Shell
0.31% 1212 Dockerfile
Ruby:
Gemfile [Filename]
Rakefile [Filename]
bin/git-linguist [Extension]
bin/github-linguist [Extension]
lib/linguist.rb [Extension]
…
If a file's language is affected by .gitattributes, the strategy will show the original detection method along with a note indicating whether the gitattributes setting changed the result or confirmed it.
For instance, if you had the following .gitattributes overrides in your repo:
*.ts linguist-language=JavaScript
*.js linguist-language=JavaScript
the output of Linguist would be something like this:
100.00% 217 JavaScript
JavaScript:
demo.ts [Heuristics (overridden by .gitattributes)]
demo.js [Extension (confirmed by .gitattributes)]
--json
The --json or -j flag output the data into JSON format.
$ github-linguist --json
{"Dockerfile":{"size":1212,"percentage":"0.31"},"Ruby":{"size":264519,"percentage":"66.84"},"C":{"size":97685,"percentage":"24.68"},"Lex":{"size":5098,"percentage":"1.29"},"Shell":{"size":1257,"percentage":"0.32"},"Go":{"size":25999,"percentage":"6.57"}}
This option can be used in conjunction with --breakdown to get a full list of files along with the size and percentage data.
$ github-linguist --breakdown --json
{"Dockerfile":{"size":1212,"percentage":"0.31","files":["Dockerfile","tools/grammars/Dockerfile"]},"Ruby":{"size":264519,"percentage":"66.84","files":["Gemfile","Rakefile","bin/git-linguist","bin/github-linguist","ext/linguist/extconf.rb","github-linguist.gemspec","lib/linguist.rb",...]}}
NB. The --strategies flag has no effect, when the --json flag is present.
Alternatively you can find stats for a single file using the github-linguist executable.
You can try running github-linguist on files in this repository itself:
$ github-linguist grammars.yml
grammars.yml: 884 lines (884 sloc)
type: Text
mime type: text/x-yaml
language: YAML
--breakdown
This flag has no effect in Single file mode.
--strategies
When using the --strategies or -s flag with a single file, you can see which detection method was used:
$ github-linguist --strategies lib/linguist.rb
lib/linguist.rb: 105 lines (96 sloc)
type: Text
mime type: application/x-ruby
language: Ruby
strategy: Extension
If a file's language is affected by .gitattributes, the strategy will show whether the gitattributes setting changed the result or confirmed it:
In this fictitious example, it says "confirmed by .gitattributes" since the detection process (using the Filename strategy) would have given the same output as the override:
.devcontainer/devcontainer.json: 27 lines (27 sloc)
type: Text
mime type: application/json
language: JSON with Comments
strategy: Filename (confirmed by .gitattributes)
In this other fictitious example, it says "overridden by .gitattributes" since the gitattributes setting changes the detected language to something different:
test.rb: 13 lines (11 sloc)
type: Text
mime type: application/x-ruby
language: Java
strategy: Extension (overridden by .gitattributes)
Here, the .rb file would normally be detected as Ruby by the Extension strategy, but .gitattributes overrides it to be detected as Java instead.
--json
Using the --json flag will give you the output for a single file in JSON format:
$ github-linguist --strategies --json lib/linguist.rb
{"lib/linguist.rb":{"lines":105,"sloc":96,"type":"Text","mime_type":"application/x-ruby","language":"Ruby","large":false,"generated":false,"vendored":false}}
NB. The --strategies has no effect, when the --json flag is present.
If you have Docker installed you can either build or use our pre-built images and run Linguist within a container:
$ docker run --rm -v $(pwd):$(pwd):Z -w $(pwd) -t ghcr.io/github-linguist/linguist:latest
66.84% 264519 Ruby
24.68% 97685 C
6.57% 25999 Go
1.29% 5098 Lex
0.32% 1257 Shell
0.31% 1212 Dockerfile
…
Please check out our contributing guidelines.
The language grammars included in this gem are covered by their repositories' respective licenses.
vendor/README.md lists the repository for each grammar.
All other files are covered by the MIT license, see LICENSE.