Jan 12, 2023 | Nix community metrics discussion

Attendees: Eelco Dolstra Graham Christensen [email protected] Ron Efroni [email protected] Théophane Hufschmitt

Goals - Overview of all the metrics we have within the community today. Recognize any metrics we are missing. Present/leverage/use the metrics

Short term - Show off how cool things are @ Nix within a few marketing related efforts to boost Nix adoption

Big picture: nix adoption, contributions, etc. Useful as a signal for how we’re doing. Also useful for marketing efforts: increase trust

Current metrics we have:

• https://nixos.github.io/nixos-metrics/ – metrics for the nixos.org website and google trends
  • Shows some popularity patterns (spikes around releases and NixCon)
• Fastly metrics
  • Fastly’s own metrics
  • Set up logging from Fastly to S3
  • The raw logs are periodically (weekly) ingested into an aggregated database in AWS Athena
  • We can then run SQL queries on the aggregated database, e.g.
    • http://nixos-metrics.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/traffic-per-day.csv
    • http://nixos-metrics.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/traffic-per-country.csv
    • http://nixos-metrics.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/cache-info-requests-per-day.csv
    • http://nixos-metrics.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/cache-info-requests-per-day-not-hosted.csv
    • http://nixos-metrics.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/cache-info-requests-per-day-per-ua.csv
    • http://nixos-metrics.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/flake-registry-requests-per-day.csv
    • http://nixos-metrics.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/top-store-paths.csv
    • http://nixos-metrics.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/narinfo-queries-per-release.csv
    • http://nixos-metrics.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/nix-installer-downloads.csv
    • http://nixos-metrics.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/nix-installer-architectures.csv
  • Raw logs are per-ip
  • Aggregated logs per country/ASN
  • Could we get some unique IP data? (unique IP count for instance) - Not relevant
    • IP counts are kinda useless as a metrics (and people get techy about tracking)
  • Filtering to try to separate usage by users and usage by CI systems
• GitHub repo stats
  • Metrics of the Nix(OS) repo usage
    • Diff version
• Script to see how many projects are using default.nix / flake.nix
  • Todo: open source that repo / publish the data – detsys
  • Would be good to see what languages those projects are using

Number of repositories that were created on a given day, which had a matching .nix file within its first 24 hours.

Number of repositories in the SourceGraph index with a matching .nix file

Note: SourceGraph doesn’t index repos with <3 stars.

Marketing

Happy Nix

Action items

• [ ] Digest all metrics into a dashboard