Code Climate now hosts over 5,000 Open Source, Ruby projects

Code Climate hit an exciting milestone last week: in the seven months since we launched our free OSS service we’ve added 5,000 Ruby projects. Code Climate is built on open source software, so we’re especially thrilled for the service to be adopted by the community.

We’re also incredibly grateful to our hosting partners Blue Box whose support makes it possible to provide this service free for OSS! Blue Box has provided us great uptime, dependable monitoring and support, and help planning for our continued growth. I definitely encourage everyone to check them
 out. Thanks guys!

Code quality can be especially important for OSS because there are many contributors involved. We try to make it easy to monitor overall quality by providing projects with a “Quality GPA” calculated by aggregating the ratings for each class, weighted by lines of code, into an average from 0 to 4.0.

Fun fact: The average open source project on Code Climate has a GPA of 3.6 – which we thinks speaks volumes about the culture of quality in the Ruby open source community. Andy Lindeman, project lead for rspec-rails, explained:

Code Climate helps keep both the core team and contributors accountable since we display the GPA badge at the top of the READMEs. The GPA is useful in finding pieces of code that would benefit from a refactor or redesign, and the feed of changes (especially when things “have gotten worse”) is useful to nip small problems before they become big problems.

Erik Michaels-Ober also uses Code Climate for his many RubyGems and noted, “I spent one day refactoring the Twitter gem with Code Climate and it dramatically reduced the complexity and duplication in the codebase. If you maintain an open source project, there’s no excuse not to use it.”

Curious about your project’s GPA? Just provide the name of the repo on the Add GitHub Repository page. Code Climate will clone the project, analyze it, and shoot you an email when the metrics are ready - all in a couple of minutes. Once you’ve added your project, you can show off your code’s GPA by adding a dynamic badge (designed by Oliver Lacan and part of his open source shields project) to your project’s README or site.

Here’s to the next 5,000 projects!