Build a Git commit frequency chart

To build a Git commit frequency chart, you can follow these general steps depending on the tools or programming languages you prefer. Below is a practical approach using Python with Matplotlib to generate a chart from Git log data.

Step 1: Export Commit Data

Run the following command in your Git repository to extract commit timestamps:

bash
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git log --pretty=format:'%ad' --date=short > commits.txt

This creates a commits.txt file with dates of each commit in YYYY-MM-DD format.

Step 2: Python Script to Create Frequency Chart

Here’s a complete Python script to read the commit dates, count them, and plot a frequency chart:

python
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import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from collections import Counter
from datetime import datetime
import matplotlib.dates as mdates

# Load commit dates
with open('commits.txt', 'r') as file:
    dates = [line.strip() for line in file]

# Count commits per date
commit_counts = Counter(dates)

# Sort by date
sorted_dates = sorted(commit_counts.items(), key=lambda x: datetime.strptime(x[0], '%Y-%m-%d'))
dates = [datetime.strptime(date, '%Y-%m-%d') for date, _ in sorted_dates]
counts = [count for _, count in sorted_dates]

# Plot
plt.figure(figsize=(12, 6))
plt.plot(dates, counts, marker='o', linestyle='-')
plt.title('Git Commit Frequency Over Time')
plt.xlabel('Date')
plt.ylabel('Number of Commits')
plt.grid(True)

# Format x-axis
plt.gca().xaxis.set_major_locator(mdates.WeekdayLocator(interval=1))
plt.gca().xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter('%Y-%m-%d'))
plt.xticks(rotation=45)

plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

Optional Enhancements:

• Group by week/month: Use pandas to resample the commit data by week/month.

• Heatmaps: Use seaborn or similar to create calendar-style heatmaps.

• CLI Tools: For simpler analysis, try gitstats or gitinspector.

Would you like the chart grouped weekly or monthly instead of daily?