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acaudwell/gource

★ 12,969C++Audience · developerComplexity · 2/5Setup · moderate

TLDR

Gource turns your git repository's commit history into a visual animation, watch your codebase grow over time as contributors move around a living tree of files and folders, then export it as a video.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((Gource))
    What it does
      Animate git history
      Visual file tree
      Contributor activity
    Inputs
      Git repos
      SVN Mercurial
      CVS Bazaar
    Outputs
      Live window
      Video via FFmpeg
    Customize
      Avatar images
      File filters
      Speed and range
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Code map

Detail Auto

An interactive map of this repo's files and how they connect — its source is parsed live in your browser. Click Visualize to build it.

filefunction / class

Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Create a visual history video of your open-source project to share in a launch post, conference talk, or project README.

USE CASE 2

Explore which contributors worked on which parts of a codebase and when, to understand ownership and activity patterns at a glance.

USE CASE 3

Pipe Gource output to FFmpeg to produce a standalone MP4 of your entire repository history for presentations or documentation.

Tech stack

C++OpenGLFFmpegGit

Getting it running

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Requires a graphics card with OpenGL support for rendering, FFmpeg must be installed separately to export video files.

In plain English

Gource turns the history of a code repository into a visual animation. As the animation plays, you watch a tree-like diagram grow and change over time: the center represents the repository root, branches represent folders, and leaves represent individual files. When a developer commits code, their name appears and moves around the tree, touching the files they changed. You can watch an entire project history unfold in seconds or minutes. It reads commit history from Git, Subversion, Mercurial, Bazaar, and CVS. You point it at a repository folder and it generates the visualization from the commit log with no extra setup. The display uses OpenGL and requires a computer with a graphics card that supports 3D hardware rendering. You can run Gource in a window or full-screen, and control the speed, date range, and visual appearance through command-line options. Custom avatar images can be set for contributors, specific users or directories can be highlighted, files can be filtered by name pattern, and the camera behavior can be adjusted. Gource is often used to produce videos showing a project evolving over its lifetime: you pipe the output to FFmpeg and get a standalone video file. These are common in project announcements, conference talks, and documentation. The README for this project is mainly a reference listing of command-line flags rather than a narrative. The main use is simple: install Gource, run it against a repository, and watch the animation. The project website is at gource.io and installers are available through most package managers.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
I want to create a Gource video of my GitHub repo and export it as an MP4. Give me the exact commands using Gource and FFmpeg to do that.
Prompt 2
I want to customize my Gource visualization to show contributor avatars and highlight one specific directory in a different color. How do I do that?
Prompt 3
I am running Gource on a large repo with 5 years of history and rendering is very slow. What command-line options can I use to speed it up?
Prompt 4
I want to limit my Gource visualization to the last 6 months of commits and only show files inside the src directory. What flags do I need?
Prompt 5
How do I generate a Gource visualization that merges commit logs from two separate git repositories into one combined animation?
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