DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.8262770
title: PIPr: A Dataset of Public Infrastructure as Code Programs

description: Programming Languages Infrastructure as Code (PL-IaC) enables IaC programs written in general-purpose programming languages like Python and TypeScript. The currently available PL-IaC solutions are Pulumi and the Cloud Development Kits (CDKs) of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Terraform. This dataset provides metadata and initial analyses of all public GitHub repositories in August 2022 with an IaC program, including their programming languages, applied testing techniques, and licenses. Further, we provide a shallow copy of the head state of those 7104 repositories whose licenses permit redistribution. The dataset is available under the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) v1.0.
Contents:

metadata.zip: The dataset metadata and analysis results as CSV files.
scripts-and-logs.zip: Scripts and logs of the dataset creation.
LICENSE: The Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) v1.0 text.
README.md: This document.
redistributable-repositiories.zip: Shallow copies of the head state of all redistributable repositories with an IaC program.
This artifact is part of the ProTI Infrastructure as Code testing project: https://proti-iac.github.io.
Metadata
The dataset's metadata comprises three tabular CSV files containing metadata about all analyzed repositories, IaC programs, and testing source code files.
repositories.csv:

ID (integer): GitHub repository ID
url (string): GitHub repository URL
downloaded (boolean): Whether cloning the repository succeeded
name (string): Repository name
description (string): Repository description
licenses (string, list of strings): Repository licenses
redistributable (boolean): Whether the repository's licenses permit redistribution
created (string, date & time): Time of the repository's creation
updated (string, date & time): Time of the last update to the repository
pushed (string, date & time): Time of the last push to the repository
fork (boolean): Whether the repository is a fork
forks (integer): Number of forks
archive (boolean): Whether the repository is archived
programs (string, list of strings): Project file path of each IaC program in the repository
programs.csv:

ID (string): Project file path of the IaC program
repository (integer): GitHub repository ID of the repository containing the IaC program
directory (string): Path of the directory containing the IaC program's project file
solution (string, enum): PL-IaC solution of the IaC program ("AWS CDK", "CDKTF", "Pulumi")
language (string, enum): Programming language of the IaC program (enum values: "csharp", "go", "haskell", "java", "javascript", "python", "typescript", "yaml")
name (string): IaC program name
description (string): IaC program description
runtime (string): Runtime string of the IaC program
testing (string, list of enum): Testing techniques of the IaC program (enum values: "awscdk", "awscdk_assert", "awscdk_snapshot", "cdktf", "cdktf_snapshot", "cdktf_tf", "pulumi_crossguard", "pulumi_integration", "pulumi_unit", "pulumi_unit_mocking")
tests (string, list of strings): File paths of IaC program's tests
testing-files.csv:

file (string): Testing file path
language (string, enum): Programming language of the testing file (enum values: "csharp", "go", "java", "javascript", "python", "typescript")
techniques (string, list of enum): Testing techniques used in the testing file (enum values: "awscdk", "awscdk_assert", "awscdk_snapshot", "cdktf", "cdktf_snapshot", "cdktf_tf", "pulumi_crossguard", "pulumi_integration", "pulumi_unit", "pulumi_unit_mocking")
keywords (string, list of enum): Keywords found in the testing file (enum values: "/go/auto", "/testing/integration", "@AfterAll", "@BeforeAll", "@Test", "@aws-cdk", "@aws-cdk/assert", "@pulumi.runtime.test", "@pulumi/", "@pulumi/policy", "@pulumi/pulumi/automation", "Amazon.CDK", "Amazon.CDK.Assertions", "Assertions_", "HashiCorp.Cdktf", "IMocks", "Moq", "NUnit", "PolicyPack(", "ProgramTest", "Pulumi", "Pulumi.Automation", "PulumiTest", "ResourceValidationArgs", "ResourceValidationPolicy", "SnapshotTest()", "StackValidationPolicy", "Testing", "Testing_ToBeValidTerraform(", "ToBeValidTerraform(", "Verifier.Verify(", "WithMocks(", "[Fact]", "[TestClass]", "[TestFixture]", "[TestMethod]", "[Test]", "afterAll(", "assertions", "automation", "aws-cdk-lib", "aws-cdk-lib/assert", "aws_cdk", "aws_cdk.assertions", "awscdk", "beforeAll(", "cdktf", "com.pulumi", "def test_", "describe(", "github.com/aws/aws-cdk-go/awscdk", "github.com/hashicorp/terraform-cdk-go/cdktf", "github.com/pulumi/pulumi", "integration", "junit", "pulumi", "pulumi.runtime.setMocks(", "pulumi.runtime.set_mocks(", "pulumi_policy", "pytest", "setMocks(", "set_mocks(", "snapshot", "software.amazon.awscdk.assertions", "stretchr", "test(", "testing", "toBeValidTerraform(", "toMatchInlineSnapshot(", "toMatchSnapshot(", "to_be_valid_terraform(", "unittest", "withMocks(")
program (string): Project file path of the testing file's IaC program
Dataset Creation
scripts-and-logs.zip contains all scripts and logs of the creation of this dataset. In it, executions/executions.log documents the commands that generated this dataset in detail. On a high level, the dataset was created as follows:

A list of all repositories with a PL-IaC program configuration file was created using search-repositories.py (documented below). The execution took two weeks due to the non-deterministic nature of GitHub's REST API, causing excessive retries.
A shallow copy of the head of all repositories was downloaded using download-repositories.py (documented below).
Using analysis.ipynb, the repositories were analyzed for the programs' metadata, including the used programming languages and licenses.
Based on the analysis, all repositories with at least one IaC program and a redistributable license were packaged into redistributable-repositiories.zip, excluding any node_modules and .git directories.
Searching Repositories
The repositories are searched through search-repositories.py and saved in a CSV file. The script takes these arguments in the following order:

Github access token.
Name of the CSV output file.
Filename to search for.
File extensions to search for, separated by commas.
Min file size for the search (for all files: 0).
Max file size for the search or * for unlimited (for all files: *).
Pulumi projects have a Pulumi.yaml or Pulumi.yml (case-sensitive file name) file in their root folder, i.e., (3) is Pulumi and (4) is yml,yaml. https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/concepts/project/
AWS CDK projects have a cdk.json (case-sensitive file name) file in their root folder, i.e., (3) is cdk and (4) is json. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/v2/guide/cli.html
CDK for Terraform (CDKTF) projects have a cdktf.json (case-sensitive file name) file in their root folder, i.e., (3) is cdktf and (4) is json. https://www.terraform.io/cdktf/create-and-deploy/project-setup
Limitations
The script uses the GitHub code search API and inherits its limitations:

Only forks with more stars than the parent repository are included.
Only the repositories' default branches are considered.
Only files smaller than 384 KB are searchable.
Only repositories with fewer than 500,000 files are considered.
Only repositories that have had activity or have been returned in search results in the last year are considered.
More details: https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/searching-on-github/searching-code
The results of the GitHub code search API are not stable. However, the generally more robust GraphQL API does not support searching for files in repositories: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45382069/search-for-code-in-github-using-graphql-v4-api
Downloading Repositories
download-repositories.py downloads all repositories in CSV files generated through search-respositories.py and generates an overview CSV file of the downloads. The script takes these arguments in the following order:

Name of the repositories CSV files generated through search-repositories.py, separated by commas.
Output directory to download the repositories to.
Name of the CSV output file.
The script only downloads a shallow recursive copy of the HEAD of the repo, i.e., only the main branch's most recent state, including submodules, without the rest of the git history. Each repository is downloaded to a subfolder named by the repository's ID.