Various Gource configuration options and how to tweak them to make Gource work better for your repo.
- FLOSS Community Metrics Meeting
- Open Source Software Development Analytics Conference
- January 29, 2016 - Brussels (before FOSDEM)
- 17:05 - 17:10: A 5 minute Lightning Talk
- Watch the Gource video generated by this demo
- Blog post about this talk
- PhD Student at the University of Greenwich studying the Linux kernel community
- Consultant at The Scale Factory
- Learn more about Dawn
Install Gource and run it on your repo with the default options
gource /path/to/your/repo
Run Gource with many more configuration options (see details below).
Small Repository with Light Activity
gource -f --logo images/bitergia_logo_sm.png --title "MailingListStats AKA mlstats"
--key --start-date '2014-01-01' --user-image-dir images -a 1 -s .05 --path ../MailingListStats
Repo:
- --path /path/to/repo (or omit and run Gource from the top level of the repo dir)
Display options:
- -f show full screen
- --logo images/bitergia_logo_sm.png
- --title "MailingListStats AKA mlstats"
- --key (shows color key for file types)
- --start-date '2014-05-01'
- --user-image-dir images (Directory with .jpg or .png images of users 'Full Name.png' for avatars)
Speed up repos with less activity:
- -a 1 (auto skip to next entry if nothing happens in x seconds - default 3)
- -s .05 (speed in seconds per day - default 10)
While Gource is running:
- Space bar to pause
- Ctrl + / - to speed up or slow down
- Use arrow keys to move camera
- Mouse over timeline widget at the bottom and click on a date to move in time.
For large repos, Gource can take a while to start the visualization while it parses the logs. In this case, you might want to record it as a video to show people or upload online. There are instructions and examples on the Gource wiki. Keep in mind that recording the video can take a long time. I didn't time it, but it took 5-10 minutes on my MacBook Air to record a 31 second video.
The Gource video for this demo was generated using this command:
gource -f --logo images/bitergia_logo_sm.png --title "MailingListStats AKA mlstats"
--key --start-date '2014-01-01' --user-image-dir images -a 1 -s .05
--path ../MailingListStats -o - | ffmpeg -y -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i - -vcodec
libx264 -preset ultrafast -pix_fmt yuv420p -crf 1 -threads 0 -bf 0 gource.mp4
More info about Gource, including downloads and information about installation. You can also look at the presentation I did about Gource at the FLOSS Community Metrics Meeting in Portland in July 2015 on using the Gource custom log format option.
I recommend playing around with the different controls to speed things up / slow down or show / hide things to get something that looks good with your data. Most of this information can be found using gource -H, but the control page on the wiki and the Gource README has more details about the controls. You might also check out these [templates] (https://github.com/FOSSRIT/gourciferous/tree/develop/Templates) with recommended configurations for different types of data (large projects, long-lived projects, etc.)
You can also check out Gourciferous for visualizing multiple repos in a single visualization using the custom log format.