Gource - awesome git visualization tool 📊

What is gource?

Gource is a tool that visualizes git repositories as video. It’s a great way to show the history of the repository in fancy way.

Installation

I use it on windows, so it’s very straightforward to install just simple download installed from main page https://gource.io/.

Usage

To make it works you need some repository to visualize for example react.
In repository directory run:

gource -1920x1080 --seconds-per-day 1 --auto-skip-seconds 1 --fixed-user-size --colour-images --start-date '2024-01-01' --stop-date '2024-03-01' --camera-mode overview --padding 1.3 --frameless --bloom-multiplier 0.3 --hide mouse,progress,filenames,dirnames --output-ppm-stream ./out.ppm --output-framerate 60

Some mentioned options

• --auto-skip-seconds 1 - if nothing is happening for 1 second, skip to next change
• --fixed-user-size - same size for all users looks better
• --bloom-multiplier 0.3 - when there is a lot of changes you might want to reduce bloom effect
• --hide mouse,progress,filenames,dirnames - hide most of not needed elements
• --camera-mode overview - overview mode is better to see what happens overall

I have out.ppm file, what now?

Now we need to convert it to video file itself has around 32 GB size! 🤯
So we need to use ffmpeg to do that.

First we need to install ffmpeg from https://ffmpeg.org/ I chose to use winget.

winget install "FFmpeg (Essentials Build)"

Now we can convert ppm file to video.

ffmpeg -y -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i out.ppm -vcodec libx264 -preset medium -crf 18 -pix_fmt yuv420p gource_video.mp4

Effect is available under https://youtu.be/viZiY6FqUrY 🎥