Surfacing GitHub Usage for packages on NuGet.org

Mohamed Riad

July 17th, 2019

There are several criteria you can use today to evaluate NuGet packages. We received feedback that you would like even more information to help choose the right packages. We’re excited to introduce GitHub Usage on nuget.org, which allows you to explore top GitHub repositories that depend on the package you are looking at.

Why surface GitHub Usage?

Part of determining a package’s trust and popularity is to know if the package is being used, who is using it, and how are they using it.

A NuGet package depended by a popular GitHub project is more likely to be trustworthy than a package used by a less known repository.

You can use GitHub’s star system as an indication of a repository’s popularity, which you can use as a criterion to evaluate a NuGet package. To set a quality baseline metric, we established that repositories with at least 100 stars are popular enough to be indexed by our service.

Another common feedback we hear is that in some cases it is difficult to find good examples of how to use a package. We have tried to address this by displaying a short description of the GitHub repositories and providing links to access them, which should help in finding good examples of how a particular NuGet package is used.

What’s next?

In the future, we plan to extend this feature to show interdependencies between NuGet packages. You can track the status of that feature using this GitHub issue.

We want to hear your feedback!

We want NuGet to meet the evolving needs of our community. Post a comment or use the GitHub issue tracking this experience to provide feedback, or ask questions. You can also reach out to us on twitter – mention @nuget in your tweets.