github-reflog

Git's reflog is a wonderful tool for viewing the base transactions in a git repository. But, when a project is hosted on Github, how does one see Github's reflog?

Well, you can't. However, using git-github-reflog you can get the next best thing.

This tool will read Github's event log for a given project and display it in a human readable form.

• Want to track down who deleted or created a branch? This tool can do that.
• Want to see who is forking or following a repo? This tool can do that.
• Want to see when code was commented on and by who? This tool can do that.
• Have someone --force pushing and overwriting history? Catch them with this tool.

You can see a screencast of git-github-reflog in action here.

Install

git-github-reflog requires Python (>=2.7), with requests and colorama.

Install git-github-reflog with pip:

pip install git-github-reflog

       # -or- for an individual user

pip install --user git-github-reflog

Then run the git-github-reflog command:

usage: git-github-reflog [-h] [--naughty] [--events] [--desc]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit
  --naughty   Ignore Github's requested poll-interval (naughty naughty)
  --events    List supported events
  --desc      Display helpful descriptions in the event log

Normally git-github-reflog will pause between requests for the amount of time Github requests (usually 60 seconds). If you want to be naughty and ignore that, then use the --naughty option. But don't do that, that'd be dickish.

Setting up your git repo

Inside your git repo, you will need to set a few things up in order for git-github-reflog to work. git-github-reflog will need to know the repo owner, the repo name, and your personal authentication information.

Setting up the repo metadata

Change into your locally cloned repo directory, and add the repo owner and repo name. The repo owner is the user or organization under which the repo is published on at Github. The repo name is the name of the repository on Github.

So, for example, in the following Github project URL:

https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap

The repo owner is twbs and the repo name is bootstrap. If I had a local clone of this repo, I would set it up for git-github-reflog thusly:

$ cd bootstrap
$ git config github.repouser twbs
$ git config github.reponame bootstrap

Setting up your authentication metadata

There are two ways which git-github-reflog can authenticate with Github: With an authentication token or with a username and password.

Using authentication tokens

Go to your personal access token page and generate a personal access token which git-github-reflog can use.

Then, set your access token globally like this:

$ git config --global github.token <access token>

Using username and password

Set your username with:

$ git config --global github.username <my username>

When you run git-github-reflog, it will ask for your password. You can also set your password (so you don't need to enter it again) with:

$ git config github.password <my password>

However, this is not recommended as it will store your password as plain-text in your .git/config file (or ~/.gitconfig if set globally).

Use as a git extension

If git-github-reflog is placed in your $PATH, then it will work as a git extension

git github-reflog

Caveats

• Github's event log only goes back 90 days, and you are only allowed to view a total of 300 past events.
• git-github-reflog does not support all of the event types which Github uses. If you'd like to help add support for a given type, fork me and write a handler!
• Github has rate limits for their API. You can very easily hit those limits using git-github-reflog.
• git-github-reflog currently has built in pagination and does not support piping to external pagers or files. The reason for this is because we want to limit the Github API calls as much as possible.
• Error handling is currently flaky at best, or nonexistent at worst. If you'd like to help, fork it and improve it!

Contributing and FAQ

• Contributing
• FAQ

Supported platforms

It should work on Linux, Mac OS X, and other Unixes.

It may work on Windows.