Visualising my commits to my work project

I recently stumbled upon gource, an amazing tool for visualising the history of commits made to a project (e.g. git, svn etc.). A video of commits to the Linux Kernel inspired me to have a go at making my own version for our main work project

To make the video, I needed to install gource and ffmpeg ,which I did via brew:

$ brew install gource
$ brew install ffmpeg

Once installed, I changed directory to the folder where I had my old work project ( git ), and subsequently first ran this command to create the visualisation of our code:

$ gource       \ 
       -s 0.05 \ # the number of seconds per day
       -a 1    \ # tell gource to skip days with no commits
       ./      \ # use the current directory where a .git repo is
       --stop-at-end \ # stop the video at the end
       --follow-user 'Calum Macdonald' \ # highlight me
       --user-image-dir users-pictures \ # pick up a picture of me
       

An interactive window pops up which displays the animated changes to the code structure:

Once I was happy with the various settings that I could tune, I created a series of ppm images by piping the output before running ffmpeg to create an mp4 video file:

$ gource ... -o output.ppm

This can be all done in one step (via the — flag) but I decided on an intermediate step as I wanted to tune a few things (e.g. video quality) and ffmpeg can take a long time to run.

To use ffmpeg and convert to an mp4 file I could upload to YouTube I ran:

$ ffmpeg -y -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i output.ppm -vcodec libx264 -preset medium -pix_fmt yuv420p -crf 1 -threads 0 -bf 0 my-video.mp4

There are more instructions on these commands here.

Finally, my finished product on YouTube, a video of our software code history from 2017–2020: