Turn Git's boring logs into exciting animations.

Anyone who has devoted himself to working with computers, at least once, but has come across common statements like: “Help me do% work%, you are still sitting at a computer without any business.” Especially often you get into this situation when you work directly with colleagues doing manual work. For these people, you often seem to be the embodiment of idleness and the main user of youtube.
Now I will show you one of the techniques, how to turn from a loafer into a wizard in the eyes of employees.

This story began with the fact that I got a job as a developer in a relatively advanced online store. To my surprise, it turned out that the entire system is developed and administered by just one programmer, not counting the manager who is in charge of monitoring the products and creating the stuffing in the CMS.

With my appearance, the question of creating a version control system and the ability to quickly roll back to a working version immediately arose. Since the choice was not great, we stopped at Git. It is also convenient and there is enough auxiliary software. No sooner said than done. Installed the necessary software, set up servers and backups, developed a plan of interaction.
')
But while we were doing all this, the boss got a fair question, and what are we doing this, but without displaying the results on the site itself. Do not we waste money for nothing. Here I will remind you once again that for an outside, uninitiated observer, we really do look like idlers. To answer these questions, we quickly set up the boss access to one of the services, showing a list of all changes in the projects, explained how to use and calmed down.

Since that time, exactly half a year has passed and a large number of commits have accumulated in the system, of which almost no benefit was actually present. While my colleague did not show me a video with visualization using gource ( they already wrote about it on Habré) of one of the Git projects.

This video gave rise to a goal in me, to do this for our store using Windows 7.

Today, dear readers of Habra, I have achieved this goal and I want to share with you step by step instructions in order to facilitate your life.

Step 1:

Download the software for Git here and install it. Two key points must be observed during installation.

First, allow the installer to register Git in the PATH environment variable.


Secondly, configure Checkout for immutability.

Step 2:

Download the current version of Gource here and install it in any convenient folder.

Step 3:

Manually add to the PATH environment variable, the path to the folder where gource.exe lies.
To do this, go to System Properties-> Advanced-> Environment Variables. There will already be PATH variables. One for the current user, the second - system-wide. Click on the PATH, then change and add the desired path, do not forget to put a semicolon at the end of the line.

Step 4:

We launch, available in Windows, a line of input of commands and in it we write the following:

The parameters you pass to gource:
-1920x1080 resolution of the screen you want to use
-f enable fullscreen
--highlight-all-users or --highlight-users select all users
--multi-sampling turn on face smoothing
C: / ... path to the local .git project folder on your computer

All is ready! Stayed last step.
Press the Enter key and after a short, automatic loading of logs, we begin to enjoy color rendering.

PS:

Do not forget that for the desired effect, your participation in the Git project must be truly active, otherwise your inaction will be immediately exposed.

PPS:

Let's make our world more beautiful!