Brew: Make stats from analytics available as a yearly report

[mbonaci]

It would be very interesting to see GA-type reports.
E.g.

• top 100 installed programs in the past year
• install/update count by month/country (would show spikes for new and updated programs)
• brew user count by country (some countries are almost 100% Windows, e.g. Croatia)

I think people are generally fine with providing anonymized data, but it would be nice to get something useful "in return".

[MikeMcQuaid]

We'll definitely not offer by country to preserve anonymity. How do you suggest we publish this data?

[tdsmith]

We'll definitely not offer by country to preserve anonymity

I think it would be reasonable to report breakout stats for countries with more than _n_ users. Which might not include Croatia. :)

[tdsmith]

You can incidentally see top 100 packages and some noodling around visualizing the options with which packages are installed here: http://rpubs.com/tdsmith/198233

[mbonaci]

@MikeMcQuaid said:

How do you suggest we publish this data?

Perhaps in a yearly blog post? Or even better, up to date stats on the web site (e.g. brew.sh/stats).
The "country thing" was just my hasty attempt to list some interesting reports. I'm sure you can think of some better examples. What do you find interesting when looking at GA UI?

[MikeMcQuaid]

Perhaps in a yearly blog post? Or even better, up to date stats on the web site (e.g. brew.sh/stats).

This sounds good for now as it's suitably low-effort. I'd love to have a somewhat realtime dashboard but we're lacking resources to work on that right now.

[MikeMcQuaid]

My current thoughts on the best approach: Ruby that's run from a Rakefile and generates HTML output that can be displayed on our Jekyll site at http://brew.sh somewhere.

[ianrtracey]

Is this still up for grabs? Sounds interesting and I have some available bandwidth.

[MikeMcQuaid]

@ianrtracey Yes, that would be great. Basically looking for a way to dump analytics data using a rake job in https://github.com/homebrew/homebrew.github.io which can be displayed publicly for everyone.

[ianrtracey]

@MikeMcQuaid Sounds great. Where would be the best place to find the analytics data?
EDIT: Upon reading https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.md, it appears as though I need access (unless there is another place I can get the analytics from?)

[ianrtracey]

@MikeMcQuaid: Also, are we interested in running this rake task nightly in order to create up-to-date reporting similar to npm? Or are we strictly looking at yearly reports?

[MikeMcQuaid]

@iainbeeston Yeh, you'd need to get access. Ideally make something generic that does the Google Analytics handshaking for e.g. something you control and gets that data and then we can work together on getting you authentication and adapting that for our analytics.

I think at first we'll not run it automatically nightly but manually e.g. monthly until it's automated.

[ianrtracey]

@MikeMcQuaid sounds good.

[MikeMcQuaid]

Available now:
https://brew.sh/analytics/

As of:
https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-formula-analytics
https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew.github.io/pull/159