Pervasive Code

Web App Autopsy has some juicy metrics such as the 100:10:1 ratio of anonymous visitors to free registered users to paying users. But they also have LOC counts which seem quite high, and which include things that rake:stats (a Rake task that’s part of Rails, which counts lines of source code and provides some basic analysis) doesn’t count. So, I hacked rake:stats to include them. Here’s what I did:

I added this code to my Rakefile:

namespace :spec do
  desc "Add files that DHH doesn't consider to be 'code' to stats"
  task :statsetup do
  require 'code_statistics'

  class CodeStatistics
    alias calculate_statistics_orig calculate_statistics
    def calculate_statistics
      @pairs.inject({}) do |stats, pair|
        if 3 == pair.size
          stats[pair.first] = calculate_directory_statistics(pair[1], pair[2]); stats
        else
          stats[pair.first] = calculate_directory_statistics(pair.last); stats
        end
      end
    end
  end
  ::STATS_DIRECTORIES << ['Views',  'app/views', /\.(rhtml|erb|rb)$/]
  ::STATS_DIRECTORIES << ['Test Fixtures',  'test/fixtures', /\.yml$/]
  ::STATS_DIRECTORIES << ['Email Fixtures',  'test/fixtures', /\.txt$/]
  # note, I renamed all my rails-generated email fixtures to add .txt
  ::STATS_DIRECTORIES << ['Static HTML', 'public', /\.html$/]
  ::STATS_DIRECTORIES << ['Static CSS',  'public', /\.css$/]
  # ::STATS_DIRECTORIES << ['Static JS',  'public', /\.js$/]
  # prototype is ~5384 LOC all by itself - very hard to filter out

  ::CodeStatistics::TEST_TYPES << "Test Fixtures"
  ::CodeStatistics::TEST_TYPES << "Email Fixtures"
  end
end
task :stats => "spec:statsetup"

(This code is based on this code I found that does something related.)

As you can see it doesn’t count JavaScript because the included Prototype code that’s included by default in Rails projects is huge-mungous. You can just uncomment that and see your project grow by 5KLOC if you want. Or you can temporarily delete those files, maybe in a quick ’svn export’ temporary directory, and run rake:stats in there to see what your own JavaScript stuff contributes.

(I tried to get a fancy regex going that excluded the six files that make up Prototype, but I couldn’t get it to work quickly. I don’t care enough about that one issue to keep spending time on it, but if you figure out a clean way to get that done I’d love to see it, just post a comment.)

Hope this proves useful!