Time for some Friday fun. Last weekend, I played with Gource, a software version control visualisation tool. It allows you to create videos of commits to your Git repository over time and by different users.

This only works for Git, Mercurial and Bazaar, but there are third party integrations for CVS and SVN. See google hosted project for more information on this.

Nick and I recently worked on an emergency project for a client to convert a Photoshop design into a Magento theme in 2 days. I thought I’d use this as an example of what it can do. Although it is a rather short project to be creating visualisations with, I still found it pretty cool.

Now all I can think about is how awesome it would be to see the Magento team create a similar visualisation for the core code.

Setting up on Mac

I run MacPorts so to install Gource was nice and easy:

sudo port sync
sudo port install gource

Then, I moved into the folder with my git repository and ran:

gource --disable-progress --stop-at-end --output-ppm-stream - | ffmpeg -y -fpre /path/to/libx264-default.ffpreset -b 3000K -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i - -vcodec libx264 gource.mp4

If you make any of your own videos with Gource, post links in the comments for us all to see!