GitHub Languages Client

A NodeJS client to get languages GitHub knows about for Advanced Search, for example.

Implementation

GitHub maintains a linguist repository that contains a languages.yml file that seems to represent the set of languages that GitHub knows about.

I convert this languages.yml file to a JSON file. ¹

I then read from this file when instantiating the GitHubLanguagesClient.

For fuzzy-searching, I use the fuse library.

API

Constructor

The default constructor parameters, used for fuzzy-searching, are

{
  maxPatternLength = 32,
  caseSensitive = false,
  includeScore = false,
  shouldSort = true,
  threshold = 0.6,
  location = 0,
  distance = 100,
  minMatchCharLength = 1,
}

The fuse.io site gives a good explanation of why and how these values are used.

`getAllLanguages`

This static method returns the complete array of all languages available, and the metadata associated with each language. It essentially returns the src/languages.json file as a JavaScript object.

import GitHubLanguagesClient from 'github-languages-client';

const allLanguages = GitHubLanguagesClient.getAllLanguages();

`search`

This class method returns fuzzy-search text matching on the language's name, aliases, and extensions.

import GitHubLanguagesClient from 'github-languages-client';

const client = new GitHubLanguagesClient();

const matchingLanguages = client.search('JavaScript');

// {
//   type: 'programming',
//   tmScope: 'source.js',
//   aceMode: 'javascript',
//   codemirrorMode: 'javascript',
//   codemirrorMimeType: 'text/javascript',
//   color: '#f1e05a',
//   aliases: [ 'js', 'node', 'javascript' ],
//   extensions:
//     [ '.js',
//       '._js',
//       '.bones',
//       '.es',
//       '.es6',
//       '.frag',
//       '.gs',
//       '.jake',
//       '.jsb',
//       '.jscad',
//       '.jsfl',
//       '.jsm',
//       '.jss',
//       '.mjs',
//       '.njs',
//       '.pac',
//       '.sjs',
//       '.ssjs',
//       '.xsjs',
//       '.xsjslib' ],
//   filenames: [ 'Jakefile' ],
//   interpreters: [ 'node' ],
//   languageId: 183,
//   name: 'JavaScript',
//   wrap: 'false',
//   searchable: 'true' },
// { type: 'programming',
//   color: '#00a6a6',
//   extensions: [ '.ms', '.mcr' ],
//   tmScope: 'source.maxscript',
//   aceMode: 'text',
//   languageId: 217,
//   name: 'MAXScript',
//   aliases: [ 'maxscript' ],
//   wrap: 'false',
//   searchable: 'true' },
//   etc., etc.

Footnotes

¹ I have a Travis CI job that runs daily and opens PRs against this repository if it detects changes in the `languages.yml` file.