SIH Tech Tidbits

Useful tips, libraries and tools from the Sydney Informatics Hub team

Show off your development history with gource


Want to show off your hard work on a project? gource displays the history of a git repo with a cool moving visualisation of how the files + folders have been worked on over time. You can install it through homebrew: brew install gource.

Here's the 10 year history of the OMIA project as a 1 minute video:

By default, running gource in a directory with a git repo will generate a moving visualisation of the commit history - depending on the speed of development on your project there are a lot of settings you can tweak to get better results. For omia I ended up with:

gource --filename-time 10.0 --date-format "%B %Y" --hide filenames --time-scale 4.0 --seconds-per-day 0.2 --auto-skip-seconds 0.1

Also check the project's documentation for how to export this to a video file using tools like ffmpeg.