Project development visualization with Gource

Gource offers a great way to visualize the progress of your project versioned by Git

Installation

Mac

brew install gource

Linux

Download the file gource-0.49.tar.gz at https://gource.io/

Extract and open the directory:

tar -xvzf ~/Downloads/gource-0.49.tar.gz -C ~/Documents

cd ~/Documents/gource-0.49

On the created directory, follow the commands to install and make gource command global:

sudo apt-get -y update

sudo apt-get install -y libsdl2-dev libsdl2-image-dev libpcre3-dev libfreetype6-dev libglew-dev libglm-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libpng12-dev libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libtinyxml-dev

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/gource/0.49

make

sudo make install

cd /usr/bin

sudo ln -s /usr/local/gource/0.49/bin/gource

Local Visualization

Now that gource is installed, go to the project directory that have a .git file and run the command, lets see the project with some nice gource options:

gource --max-files 1500 --key -f --highlight-users --filename-time 3 --output-framerate 25 -s 0.6 --multi-sampling --auto-skip-seconds .1

Install ffmpeg

First, lets install ffmpeg to covert the gource file to .mp4

Mac

brew install libvpx

brew install ffmpeg --with-libvpx

Linux

sudo apt-get -y install ffmpeg

Making a .mp4 video

Now we will generate a gource.ppm file from the currently visualization:

gource --max-files 1000 --key -800x600 --highlight-users --filename-time 3 --output-framerate 25 -s 0.6 --multi-sampling --auto-skip-seconds .1 --stop-at-end --hide mouse,progress -o gource.ppm

And then with ffmpeg we will convert the gource.ppm file into gource.mp4 file:

ffmpeg -y -r 15 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i gource.ppm -vcodec libx264 -preset medium -pix_fmt yuv420p -crf 1 -threads 0 -bf 0 gource.mp4

The gource.mp4 file will be generated in the directory of the project and can be moved to somewhere else, have fun!

If the file gets too large, use ffmpeg to reduce the file size, an output.mp4 file will be generated:

ffmpeg -i gource.mp4 -c:v libx264 -crf 19 -level 3.1 -preset slow -tune film -filter:v scale=-1:720 -sws_flags lanczos -c:a libfdk_aac -vbr 5 output.mp4