Clones

Question: How many copies of an open source project repository have been saved on a local machine?

A clone is a copy of a repository saved to a local machine.

Note: Many times clone and technical fork are used interchangeably, but there is a difference between the two. A technical fork is a copy of a repository on the same platform, whereas a clone is a copy on a local machine.

Objectives

The objective of the Clones metric is to ascertain how many copies of a project are downloaded. Analysis of clones may provide insight into the project’s popularity and usage.

Implementation

The number of clones and unique clones can be found through the traffic tab of your repository on GitHub.

Steps

Open your repository on your browser and click on the Insights tab in the navigation bar. It’s the 2nd option from the back.
Choose Traffic from the sidepanel and you should see your cloning stats for the said project.