gourcers

A Rust program for executing gource on many git repositories.

This program can be configured to clone every repo accessible by the GitHub account owning the token provided. You can filter the repos using the --include and --include-file options (see Include syntax).

After cloning the repos, this program will execute gource on each of them, saving the generated logs to a text file. Once all repos have had their logs generated, the logs are merged and sorted.

Finally, the merged log is passed into gource. This can be saved to a video.

Installation

Before installing, make sure you have the following programs installed:

• git (also set up SSH keys as gourcers only uses SSH URLs)
• gource

Usage

The following command is generally a good starting point:

# create a GitHub token with the 'repo' scope and store it in GITHUB_TOKEN or use the '-t' argument
export GITHUB_TOKEN="ghp_<...>"
# note: gourcers can also read this from a .env file in the current directory

# replace <your_username> with your GitHub username
gourcers -d ./gourcers-data -i "owner:<your_username>"

Explanation

• -d ./gourcers-data: Create a data folder to clone the repos into. Prevents cloning again on the next run.
• -i "owner:<your_username>": Include all repos owned by <your_username>. See Include syntax for more selectors.

Options

$ gourcers --help
A CLI tool for making gource visualizations of multiple repositories

Usage: gourcers [OPTIONS] --token <TOKEN>

Options:
  -t, --token <TOKEN>
          Your personal access token for GitHub.
          
          This token must have the `repo` scope.
          
          [env: GITHUB_TOKEN=]

  -d, --data-dir <DATA_DIR>
          The directory to store the cloned repos and gource logs.
          
          If left blank, a temporary directory will be created and removed after finishing.
          
          If you are going to be running this command multiple times, it is recommended to specify a directory to ensure work is not done multiple times needlessly.

  -y, --temp
          Silently allow using a temporary data directory instead of prompting for confirmation

      --skip-clone
          Skip cloning/pulling repos and assume they are already present in the data directory

  -i, --include <INCLUDE>
          Include any repos matching the given selectors. Can be applied multiple times

  -f, --include-file <INCLUDE_FILE>
          Include any repos matching the given selectors from the given file

      --gource-args <GOURCE_ARGS>
          Extra arguments to pass to gource.
          
          The resulting command will look like `gource {gource_args} {data_dir}/sorted.txt`.
          
          Using `--hide root` is highly recommended.
          
          [default: "--hide root -a 1 -s 1 -c 4 --key --multi-sampling -1920x1080"]

  -h, --help
          Print help (see a summary with '-h')

  -V, --version
          Print version

Include syntax

By default, all repos are ignored. You must include / exclude repositories based on a few selectors:

• *:*: A special selector that matches all repos
• name:<value>: Matches any repos that have the name <value>. Ex. name:gourcers
• owner:<value>: Matches any repos with the owner <value>. Ex. owner:campbellcole
• full_name:<value>: Matches any repos with the full name <value>. Ex. full_name:campbellcole/gourcers
• is_fork:<true/false>: Matches any repos that are (true) or are not (false) forks. Ex. is_fork:false

Selectors will include repos matching the given rule. Since all repos are ignored by default, you must add some rules to explicitly include certain repositories, then the inverted rules will filter the repos which have been explicitly included.

To invert a rule, prefix it with !, e.g. !owner:campbellcole. This will exclude all repositories whose owner is campbellcole.

Comments are allowed in an ignore file. Comments are lines that begin with #. You may not add a comment to the end of a line. Doing so will cause the <value> part of the selector to include the comment, spaces, and # character, which is not what you want.

If you are having trouble tuning your filters, you might try running the app with RUST_LOG="gourcers=debug" to see which repos are being included and excluded, and why. gourcers emits detailed explanations as to why each repository has been included or excluded.

Examples

Include all repositories which are not forks

Include File

# include all repos whose owner is 'campbellcole'
owner:campbellcole
# exclude all repos which are a fork
!is_fork:true

Command Arguments

-i 'owner:campbellcole' -i '!is_fork:true'

---

Include all accessible repositories not owned by your account

Include File

# include all repos
*:*
# exclude all repos whose owner is 'campbellcole'
!owner:campbellcole

Command Arguments

-i '*:*' -i '!owner:campbellcole'

Saving output to a video

Previous (unreleased) versions of gourcers would pipe the gource output to ffmpeg. This behavior has been removed following the suckless philosophy and Unix philosophy.

All new (v1.0.0+) versions support this behavior through piping gourcers into ffmpeg. gourcers writes all progress bars and status updates to stderr, and you can control the gource arguments, allowing you to pipe gource to stdout.

Example

gourcers -d ./data -i 'owner:campbellcole' \
  --gource-args="--hide root -a 1 -s 1 -c 4 --key --multi-sampling -1920x1080 -o -" 2>/dev/null \
  | ffmpeg -r 60 -f image2pipe -c:v ppm -i - -c:v libx264 -preset ultrafast -crf 1 -bf 0 gource.mp4

The key parts here are:

• -o - in --gource-args
• 2>/dev/null at the end of the gourcers invocation
• -r 60 -f image2pipe -c:v ppm -i - in the ffmpeg args

Everything else can be changed as desired.