The Software Heritage Graph Dataset: Public Software Development Under One Roof

Abstract

Software Heritage is the largest existing public archive of software source code and accompanying development history: it currently spans more than five billion unique source code files and one billion unique commits, coming from more than 80 million software projects. This paper introduces the Software Heritage graph dataset: a fully-deduplicated Merkle DAG representation of the Software Heritage archive. The dataset links together file content identifiers, source code directories, Version Control System (VCS) commits tracking evolution over time, up to the full states of VCS repositories as observed by Software Heritage during periodic crawls. The dataset's contents come from major development forges (including GitHub and GitLab), FOSS distributions (e.g., Debian), and language-specific package managers (e.g., PyPI). Crawling information is also included, providing timestamps about when and where all archived source code artifacts have been observed in the wild. The Software Heritage graph dataset is available in multiple formats, including downloadable CSV dumps and Apache Parquet files for local use, as well as a public instance on Amazon Athena interactive query service for ready-to-use powerful analytical processing. Source code file contents are cross-referenced at the graph leaves, and can be retrieved through individual requests using the Software Heritage archive API.