gitview

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Explore contribution history, code hotspots, ownership, and function evolution in any local Git repository. One binary, no account, everything stays local.

Status: gitview is currently a Web MVP under active development.

Why gitview?

Git contains more than a commit list. It can help answer practical maintenance questions:

• Who understands this area of the codebase?
• Which files change often and carry concentrated ownership risk?
• What caused a spike in activity during a particular month?
• How has a function evolved, and which commits shaped it?
• Where should a maintainer or new contributor start reading?

gitview turns local Git history into a focused web interface. It is designed for understanding and maintaining projects—not for ranking individual developer performance.

Features

• Repository overview — commits, contributors, additions, deletions, churn, monthly trends, and recent activity.
• Contributor details — activity timeline, primary paths, and the commits behind each contributor's history.
• File hotspots — find frequently changed files using an explicit score based on change frequency and churn.
• Code ownership — inspect historical owners, recent maintainers, contribution share, and estimated bus factor.
• Function history — browse functions, complexity, hotspots, contributors, and probable change history across Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java, and Rust.
• Branches and commits — inspect branch state, working-tree changes, commit metadata, and diffs.
• Revision comparison — compare two Git revisions across totals, contributors, files, and commits.
• Monthly explanation — explain activity changes through the contributors, paths, and commits that drove them.
• Focused filtering — narrow analysis by author date and repository path; filters are preserved in the URL.
• English and Simplified Chinese UI.

Quick Start

Requirements

• Go 1.26+
• Node.js 20.19+ or 22.12+
• Git
• A C compiler for the Tree-sitter Go bindings

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/lucasdevco/gitview.git
cd gitview
cd frontend && npm ci && cd ..
make build

make build compiles the React frontend, embeds it into the Go binary, and creates ./gitview.

Analyze a repository

# Analyze the current repository
./gitview serve

# Analyze another local repository
./gitview serve /path/to/repository

# Use a different port
./gitview serve --port 9090 /path/to/repository

Open http://127.0.0.1:8080. Pass --port 0 to let the operating system choose an available port.

gitview intentionally listens on loopback only. It does not expose a --host option.

How It Works

gitview reads repository metadata and history through the system Git executable, calculates analysis results in memory, and serves an embedded React application from the same binary.

• Repository code, hooks, and build scripts are not executed.
• No account or external service is required.
• Repository data stays on the local machine.
• Analysis results distinguish direct Git facts from derived or approximate metrics.

Current Limitations

• Function-level analysis supports Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java, and Rust; other languages fall back to file-level analysis.
• Function history is marked probable; moves, renames, and boundary changes may not be tracked precisely.
• Analysis focuses on history reachable from the selected branch or revision.
• There is no persistent index, background watcher, multi-repository mode, or GitHub/GitLab integration yet.
• JSON/CSV export and static reports are not yet available.

See the roadmap for planned work.

Development

Run the backend and frontend separately for local development:

# Terminal 1: start the Go API server
go run ./cmd/gitview serve /path/to/repository

# Terminal 2: start Vite with /api proxied to 127.0.0.1:8080
cd frontend
npm run dev

For automatic rebuilds after source changes:

make watch

Useful checks:

make test
make check

Project Layout

cmd/gitview/        CLI entry point and server lifecycle
internal/gitrepo/   System Git adapter
internal/overview/  Repository, contributor, file, ownership, and comparison analysis
internal/function/  Tree-sitter function parsing and history analysis
internal/server/    Local HTTP API and SPA delivery
internal/web/       Embedded frontend assets and backend-only fallback
frontend/           React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS, and shadcn/ui application
docs/               Product requirements, metric definitions, architecture, and roadmap

Documentation

• Documentation index
• Product requirements
• Metric definitions
• Technical design
• UI interactions
• Roadmap
• Open questions and decisions

Acknowledgements

The product structure and local-first presentation were inspired by agentsview.