Ruby files appear to be excluded from LOC totals (e.g., Homebrew/brew shows 176 LOC)

[oasaleh]

Hi! I'm seeing what looks like a language-detection / inclusion bug: Codetabs appears not to count Ruby files in the LOC totals.

Example

• Repo: Homebrew/brew (branch: main)
• Codetabs reports: 176 LOC (screenshot attached)

However, other LOC tooling reports a much larger codebase:

• ghloc reports roughly ~320 KLOC for the same repo/branch (screenshot attached):
  https://ghloc.vercel.app/Homebrew/brew?branch=main

Why this seems wrong

A single Ruby file in the Homebrew/brew repo is 349 LOC, which is already higher than Codetabs' entire reported total (176 LOC):

• https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/dbb36f1e82f520a2a7e638e580f93b67a8cf845c/Library/Homebrew/vendor/bundle/ruby/3.4.0/gems/concurrent-ruby-1.3.6/lib/concurrent-ruby/concurrent/atomic/reentrant_read_write_lock.rb#L4

Expected behavior

Codetabs' LOC totals should include Ruby sources (and/or clearly indicate if certain languages/paths are intentionally excluded).

Actual behavior

Ruby-heavy repos (like Homebrew/brew) report extremely low totals, suggesting Ruby files are not being counted.

Questions

• Is Ruby intentionally excluded from LOC calculations?
• If not, is there a known issue with .rb detection or language configuration?

[oasaleh]

I tracked this down: Codetabs runs scc to compute LOC (scc -f json). scc respects .gitignore by default, and Homebrew/brew's .gitignore starts with /* (ignore everything) and then selectively un-ignores a handful of files (e.g. README.md, Dockerfile). That causes scc to only count those few visible files, which makes it look like Ruby isn't being counted for that repo.

Fix: run scc with .gitignore disabled (--no-gitignore) while still honoring Codetabs' own ignored patterns (-M ...).

PR: #42

Here's my local run

[jolav]

Your solution is correct, but that would change the default behavior the LOC service has had until now.

That’s why I need to investigate and think more about it.

[oasaleh]

Sure! Here's a bit more clarification though.

The key point is that Codetabs runs on a GitHub snapshot (clone/archive), which contains only tracked files. .gitignore is meant to hide untracked local files from git status / git add — it's not a definition of what "belongs" to the repo, and it can even match files that are already tracked.

So when Codetabs applies .gitignore during LOC, it's no longer doing "ignore local junk" (there isn't any in a fresh clone); it becomes an additional exclude list that can hide tracked code and produce wildly misleading totals (Homebrew/brew's /* pattern basically zeroes the repo out).

That's why I think using scc --no-gitignore is a correctness fix (count what's actually in the repo), not just a preference change.