Creating a custom Git flow visualization | Hacker News Reader

Creating a custom Git flow visualization

blog.funda.nl

65 pointscwebbdesign17 comments

Summary: Author created a Stash-based visualization tool that takes the output of git log --graph --oneline --decorate --all and renders a pretty diagram.

Quite nice, actually. Not open source, as it is a private side project of the company, but examples are available on GitHub (cf TFA).

It actually doesn't take the output of 'git log' at all. That output is visualized by many other libraries already (nicer, frankly). What I have done is create a completely different graph, inspired by the chart presented with git-flow by Vincent Driessen (http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/).

Main difference is that the develop and master branch always run all the way to the top. Take any public Github repo and compare the output of beta.gitflowchart.com/ with the git-log output. It is not the same thing.

Ah, OK, thanks. That wasn't clear to me from the article, but then, I was likely skimming and not reading in detail.

Funny that the library is not open source, but still they do host it on a public github repo. Doesn't make much sense to me, and there should be some clarifications on what is authorized and what is not.

Github is "Free for open source projects", I have always wondered what definition they would use for "open source". Looked for it a few years ago, and didn't find it. Any clue on what's acceptable policy for them? Maybe they consider that public repo = open source, because code is accessible?

Hi, I am the author of the library on Github.

First of all, Github is not free for Open Source, it is free for public projects (https://github.com/pricing). Not just for OSS, if the repo is public, it is free.

Is Git Flow Chart Open Source? No, it is not. Choosing an OSS license would make it hard to make money on the plugin. On Atlassians marketplace, this means that if your project is OSS, you get it for free, but if you are a paying user of Stash, you also pay for the plugin. We want to follow the same lines with Github: public repos are free, so you can use the chart on them for free. If you pay for a private repo at GitHub, for now, you cannot use the chart. We may make it available, but at a cost. However, we do want to share the code and allow you to inspect, study and contribute improvements. The core code of Git Flow Chart is hosted on GitHub. It is a javascript library and comes with unit tests and a standalone HTML page that allows you to test improvements locally. Feel free to fork.

Thanks,

I'm glad to learn gitHub rephrased their offer from "free for open source" to "free for public projects", it's more straightforward.

You might want to create a LICENSE.md, or to make the following sentence stand out in your README, right now it's buried in the middle of a paragraph: "I will keep use of the plug-in free for non-commercial and personal use."

And just to finish that thought, GitHub also offers free organization plans, but only for open source projects, that is, projects with approved open source licenses. Details on GitHub.

Oh, and seriously, if you have an interesting plan with this library and it isn't "I will compete with you, offering a cheaper version by embedding your library", I will most probably be super enthousiastic and will license it to you for free. Just ping me through Github.

Very nice, I've always been dissatisfied with most visualisations of real git repos using git flow. It's really hard to explain to non-devs the state of the branches, ideally the roadmap to the next release would be glanceable.

We're looking to build an AtlasBoard for our project and the ideas here are very useful. We use bitbucket, so I'm not sure how similar the APIs there are to Stash, but one would hope they are similar enough that your code points us in the right direction.

This looks really slick. I've seen some good and not-so-good visualizations of git log --graph --decorate --all (I always end up mapping this to 'git map'), and this looks nicely clean.

My biggest question though, is on the Github permissions. It requires read/write access on all user data (and public repositories), but I'd expect read access being all that's required.

Thanks for the feedback on the GitHub permissions. We will evaluate the necessity of the current scopes and revise them or better explain their use in the Privacy Policy. As the domain name already suggest: this is a BETA version. We are still working out the details of our service!

Ooh. That's wrong. We have to fix that. It should only require read access of course. Apologies.

[shameless plug] git-cola/git-dag[1] can do this kind of visualization[2], and you can interact with the nodes too (checkout files, diff, etc).

[1] https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola

[2] https://git-cola.github.io/screenshots.html

No, those are looking way nicer. But they just render the git-log output, whereas the chart presented here does a different kind of chart, specifically for git-flow.

If you're looking for something that can do this in the command line, check out `tig`. It also supports blames, etc.

This is the area where I feel that Atlassian's SourceTree really shines. It is still an effective tool for manipulating git with a GUI, but the git branching display is insanely useful.

Thanks for highlighting it, just downloaded... it's even free!

https://www.atlassian.com/software/sourcetree/overview

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