Based on community feedback, we recognized that many of you are looking to share your work on connectors with the community. Also, developers are looking for more examples to follow. With these community needs in mind, today, we are announcing the Open Source Community Connectors repository on GitHub.
Use open source Community Connectors
For every connector that is hosted in the open source repository, the Data Studio Developer Relations team will manage a deployment for the connector’s latest code. This managed deployment will enable all users to immediately try the connector in Data Studio by simply clicking a link. Managed deployments also make it easier for developers since you do not have to deploy and maintain the connectors yourself; we’ll take care of this for you.
You can try out the following Open Source connectors directly in Data Studio:
- npm Downloads connector: Fetch download counts for specific npm packages by date
- Fusion Tables connector: Fetch data from Google Fusion Tables
- Stack Overflow Questions connector: Fetch Stack Overflow Question metadata for specific tags
Example dashboards using these connectors:
Learn about best practices
If you want to connect to new Data Sources using Data Studio but have not yet looked into Community Connectors, now would be the best time to start since a variety of example connector code have become available. These examples will give you a head start and create a platform for you to learn and share with other community members.
Initially, we are releasing these connectors in our open source repository:
Contribute to the community
If want to submit your own open source connector to the repository, you can send us a pull request. Alternatively you can maintain your own repository and link to that from the official repository.
This Git repository is a small start where we plan to make new additions. We have already seen other open source Community Connectors like data.world and getSTAT. We are hoping that initiative will help developers and users to create connectors to new Data Sources and thus make more data accessible in Data Studio. Developers can also collaborate with each other as well as report new issues and fix existing ones through these open source connectors.
This collaboration platform gives developers the option to leverage support from the community. If you want to develop your own connector but are unable to maintain it in the long run, you can add it to our repository so that the community can support it.
Visit the repository and start building your own Community Connector today!
Posted by Minhaz Kazi, Google Analytics team
