Wrapper for Gource, GitHub and ffmpeg

A Git repository history visualization tool using gource.

Synopsis

Put the scripts from the bin directory somehwere in your PATH

Then you can generate videos like this:

cd your_git_repo

github_gravatar_fetch     # You only need to run this once per repo.

gource_since "90 days ago"

This should launch Gource and then when Gource is done, produce an mp4 file in the working directory.

Temp files created by this script are not cleaned up automatically as you may want to re-use them. However, the .ppm file in particular is very large and thus should always be deleted when you are finished with it.

Example Output

This is the ffmpeg-generated video from running gource_since "10 days ago" in the public git repo for the PHP interpreter.

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Overview of gource and ffmpeg

gource creates a 3D visualization of the networks formed by authors and committers over time in Git. This script provides a configuration for gource that should work well for repos that are up to a few years old.

When you just run gource by itself on the command line, you get an animated 3D playback of activity in your Git repo. But it's not immediately obvious how to save it and the icons for authors get too small if you have a lot of authors or a lot of code or both. gource_since is a script that fixes all that:

• Your gource video is saved to disk as an .mp4 video file, in the current directory.
• The display of gource has been tweaked so it should look better in most cases than it does by default.
• A script is included to pull everyone's avatar from gravatar.com, which makes authors much easier to differentiate and is generally more fun!

It is intended that you fork this script and change the settings to you match your own needs. No two Git repos are the same and often in order to get a nice visualization, you need to tweak settings!