How to generate a graph of a repo's git history

Since I was in college I have been quite curious about graphs. I remember when I first saw the Dijkstra’s algorithm my instinctive reaction was to smile. I thought it was such a clever and elegant solution that it was just beautiful.

Lately I have been very curious about generative art, in other words, how to generate art using math and code. Actually it all started as real art, which is definitively something I will try out someday in the future. Hopefully my home will have at least one painting made by me.

But that got me into thinking about digital ways to do similar things.

On this note I am experimenting with gource to generate a graph visualization about a couple of git repos.

This is the command line I used to generate these.

cd repo
gource
  --seconds-per-day 0.1 \
  --hide mouse,filenames,dirnames \
  --output-ppm-stream - \
  --output-framerate 30 | ffmpeg -y -r 30 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i - -b 65536K movie.mp4

The result is pretty beautiful. This is how it looks my org-roam media files git history. I have a separated LFS git repo for that.

Here is a short video of about 3 years of history of my org history.

And here is another short video of the history of my org-roam media files history.