Rabbit is a CLI tool designed to identify bots among GitHub contributors based on their activity types, such as commits and issue handling. It utilizes the GitHub API to generate activity sequences and predict account types with high confidence levels, achieving competitive performance metrics compared to previous tools. The tool is efficient, processing data with significantly reduced execution time and resource usage.

1. RABBIT: A CLI tool for identifying
bots based on GitHub events
Natarajan Chidambaram,
Tom Mens,
Alexandre Decan
International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, Data and Tool Showcase Track, 2024
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2. Pushing commits
Commenting PR
Merging PR
• Opening issue
• Updating wiki page
• Publishing Release
• Creating tag
• Deleting branch
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Activity types
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3. Tool Data received Execution time
BotHunter 276 MB 376 minutes
BIMAN
Dey et al.
MSR 2020
BoDeGHa
Golzadeh et al.
JSS 2021
BoDeGiC
Golzadeh et al.
BENEVOL 2020
BotHunter
Abdellatif et al.
MSR 2022
Tool Data received Execution time
BoDeGHa 1289 MB 415 minutes
On 518 contributors
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4. 4
Inputs
Contributor
names
GitHub
API key
Optional
parameters
Generate account
activity sequences
Query GitHub
Events API
Compute features
Predict account type
RABBIT Output
TERMINAL
N. Chidambaram, A. Decan, and T. Mens. 2023. Distinguishing Bots From Human Developers Based on Their GitHub Activity Types.
In Seminar on Advanced Techniques & Tools for Software Evolution (SATToSE). CEUR

5. % rabbit --input-file contributors.txt --key <APIkey>
account prediction confidence
johnpbloch-bot bot 0.998
tensorflow-jenkins bot 0.853
AlexandreDecan human 0.700
natarajan-chidambaram human 0.553
codecov bot 0.985
tommens human 0.931
https://github.com/natarajan-chidambaram/RABBIT
Tool F1-score Data received # API queries Execution time
BotHunter 0.92 276 MB > 15,000 376 minutes
RABBIT 0.91 60 MB < 1,500 8 minutes
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On 518 contributors
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6. RABBIT Runs Faster and Eats Less
https://github.com/natarajan-chidambaram/RABBIT
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