Indicators

The indicators view computes derived signals from your daily metrics, giving you a sense of how fast a project is growing and in which direction it’s heading. Indicators are computed using 28-day trailing windows and are available wherever you query data — via velocirepo query, the persistent .duckdb file, and Parquet exports.

Only metrics with a daily_ prefix are included (these represent per-day deltas like daily_stars, daily_downloads, daily_pageviews). Cumulative total_* metrics are excluded since growth rates on snapshots aren’t meaningful.

Schema

Column Type Description
project VARCHAR Project ID
source VARCHAR Source name (github, pypi, etc.)
target VARCHAR Specific package, repo, or site being tracked
metric VARCHAR Underlying metric (e.g., daily_stars)
indicator VARCHAR Indicator name (growth_rate or trend)
date DATE Date of computation
value DOUBLE Computed value
tags JSON Optional metadata from the underlying metric

Growth rate

Measures how much activity increased or decreased compared to the prior period. Computed as:

growth_rate = (sum_last_28d - sum_prior_28d) / sum_prior_28d

A value of 0.15 means 15% more activity in the last 28 days compared to the 28 days before that. Negative values indicate declining activity.

velocirepo query "
  SELECT project, metric, date, ROUND(value, 3) AS growth_rate
  FROM indicators
  WHERE indicator = 'growth_rate'
    AND metric = 'daily_stars'
  ORDER BY date DESC
  LIMIT 5
"
┌──────────────┬─────────────┬────────────┬─────────────┐
│   project    │   metric    │    date    │ growth_rate │
├──────────────┼─────────────┼────────────┼─────────────┤
│ py-shiny     │ daily_stars │ 2026-06-22 │ 0.114       │
│ dplyr        │ daily_stars │ 2026-06-22 │ -0.182      │
│ plotnine     │ daily_stars │ 2026-06-22 │ -0.488      │
│ great-tables │ daily_stars │ 2026-06-22 │ -0.174      │
│ ggsql        │ daily_stars │ 2026-06-22 │ -0.875      │
└──────────────┴─────────────┴────────────┴─────────────┘

Trend

Measures the daily rate of change via linear regression over the trailing 28 days. The value represents units per day — for example, a trend of 3.2 on daily_stars means the project is gaining roughly 3.2 more stars per day than it was at the start of the window.

velocirepo query "
  SELECT project, metric, date, ROUND(value, 2) AS trend_per_day
  FROM indicators
  WHERE indicator = 'trend'
    AND metric = 'daily_downloads'
    AND project = 'plotnine'
  ORDER BY date DESC
  LIMIT 5
"
┌──────────┬─────────────────┬────────────┬───────────────┐
│ project  │     metric      │    date    │ trend_per_day │
├──────────┼─────────────────┼────────────┼───────────────┤
│ plotnine │ daily_downloads │ 2026-06-22 │ -140.39       │
│ plotnine │ daily_downloads │ 2026-06-21 │ -60.35        │
│ plotnine │ daily_downloads │ 2026-06-20 │ 135.05        │
│ plotnine │ daily_downloads │ 2026-06-19 │ 186.6         │
│ plotnine │ daily_downloads │ 2026-06-18 │ 112.38        │
└──────────┴─────────────────┴────────────┴───────────────┘

Joining with project metadata

You can join indicators with project metadata for richer views:

velocirepo query "
  SELECT p.name, i.metric, i.indicator, i.date, ROUND(i.value, 3) AS value
  FROM indicators i
  JOIN projects p ON i.project = p.id
  WHERE i.date = (SELECT MAX(date) FROM indicators)
  ORDER BY i.indicator, i.value DESC
  LIMIT 5
"
┌────────────┬─────────────────────┬─────────────┬────────────┬───────┐
│    name    │       metric        │  indicator  │    date    │ value │
├────────────┼─────────────────────┼─────────────┼────────────┼───────┤
│ great-docs │ daily_issues_closed │ growth_rate │ 2026-06-22 │ 5.143 │
│ mcp-repl   │ daily_prs_merged    │ growth_rate │ 2026-06-22 │ 3.143 │
│ mcp-repl   │ daily_prs_opened    │ growth_rate │ 2026-06-22 │ 2.815 │
│ great-docs │ daily_issues_opened │ growth_rate │ 2026-06-22 │ 1.647 │
│ Positron   │ daily_pr_comment    │ growth_rate │ 2026-06-22 │ 1.271 │
└────────────┴─────────────────────┴─────────────┴────────────┴───────┘

Custom indicators

You can define your own indicators in velocirepo.toml. Each indicator is a named TOML table with a description and a SQL query:

[indicators.weekly_momentum]
description = "7-day trailing sum"
query = """
  SELECT project, source, target, metric,
    '{{indicator_name}}' AS indicator, date,
    SUM(value) OVER w AS value,
    tags
  FROM metrics WHERE metric LIKE 'daily_%'
  WINDOW w AS (PARTITION BY project, source, target, metric, tags ORDER BY date ROWS 6 PRECEDING)
"""

The {indicator_name} placeholder is replaced with the TOML key at runtime (e.g., weekly_momentum).

Behavior: Custom indicators are added alongside the built-in defaults. To disable the defaults, set:

[settings]
include_default_indicators = false

To inspect the built-in defaults:

velocirepo show-indicators --defaults

Without --defaults, show-indicators prints all active indicators (defaults + custom). You can redirect to your config to use as a starting point:

velocirepo show-indicators --defaults >> velocirepo.toml

Next steps