git-read

Generate a website based on a project’s Git history.

• Serve the project’s README.md as the homepage
• Index the history through its commits
• Transforms commit messages HTML through a syntax-aware Markdown parser
• Display the commits alongside their code changes

Command-line Interface

Once installed, make sure that the bin/git-read executable is available on your path so that the git program can invoke it as a subcommand.

To learn of the ways to to invoke the command, execute git read --help:

usage: git read [--help] [-v|--verbose] [-s|--server|--serve]
                [-g | --git-dir <path>] [-o | --output-dir <path>]

Generate HTML from your project's Git history

OPTIONS

      --output-dir
          specify the directory where the site will be built

      --git-dir
          specify the parent directory of the project's .git/ directory

      --verbose
          print debugging information during the build process

      --server
          build and serve assets with a server available at
          http://127.0.0.1:4567

      --help
          generate this help output

Revising a Project’s History

If you’re consuming this tool and using it to tell the story of your project’s origins and growth, you might be tempted to become a bit of a revisionist historian.

This might come as a shock, but this project was not perfected implemented from the start, and is in fact the result of countless pick, squash, reword, fixup, and drop rebase operations.

While this can be harmless for pre-released projects, rewriting history once the resulting website is deployed and publicized would result in 404s and broken URLs.

To counteract this, git-read will include and compile pages for any commits that are git tag-ed, along with the rest of their history.