A dataset of GitHub Actions workflow histories

This replication package accompagnies the dataset and exploratory empirical analysis reported in the paper "A dataset of GitHub Actions workflow histories" published in the IEEE MSR 2024 conference. (The Jupyter notebook can be found in previous version of this dataset). The dataset was created as follow : First, we used GitHub SEART to get a list of every non-fork repositories created before January 1st, 2023. having at least 300 commits and at least 100 stars where at least one commit was made after January 1st, 2023. (The goal of these filter is to exclude experimental and personnal repositories). We checked if a folder .github/workflows existed. We filtered out those that did not contained this folder. We applied the tool gigawork (version 1.3.0) to extract every files from this folder. The exact command used is python scripts/batch.py -d /ourDataFolder/repositories/ -e /ourDataFolder/errors -o /ourDataFolder/output -- -w /ourDataFolder/workflows. (The script batch.py can be found on GitHub). Using the extracted data, the following files were created : workflows.tar.gz contains the dataset of GitHub Actions workflow file histories. repositories.csv.gz contains metadata about the GitHub repositories containing the workflow files. These metadata were extracted using the SEART Search tool. workflows.csv.gz contains the metadata for the extracted workflow files. auxiliaries.csv.gz is a similar file for auxiliary files. The metadata is separated in different columns: repository: The repository (author and repository name) from which the workflow was extracted. The separator "---" allows to distinguish between the author and the repository name commit_hash: The commit hash returned by git author_name: The name of the author that changed this file author_email: The email of the author that changed this file committer_name: The name of the committer committer_email: The email of the committer committed_date: The committed date of the commit authored_date: The authored date of the commit file_path: The path to this file in the repository previous_file_path: The path to this file before it has been touched file_hash: The name of the related workflow file in the dataset previous_file_hash: The name of the related workflow file in the dataset, before it has been touched change_type: A single letter (A,D or M) representing the type of change made to the workflow (Added, Deleted or Modified) valid_yaml: A boolean indicating if the file is a valid YAML file. probably_workflow: A boolean representing if the file contains the YAML key on and jobs. (Note that it can still be an invalid YAML file). valid_workflow: A boolean indicating if the file respect the syntax of GitHub Actions workflow. A freely available JSON Schema (used by gigawork) was used in this goal. Both repositories.csv.gz and auxiliaries.csv.gz are following this format.