Functions for scraping git commits from repositories associated with a PhD (or anything else) and plotting them. The result looks something like this.

The get_commits() function takes a path and searches each of the subdirectories. For each subdirectory that is a git repository it extracts the git commits. The other arguments can be used to filter the commits to a specific date or users. The output is a tibble with columns "SHA", "Name", "When" and "Repository".

commits <- get_commits("/path/to/repos")

If you have repositories in multiple locations you can combine them using dplyr::bind_rows() and filter on the SHA to remove any duplicates.

commits1 <- get_commits("/path/to/repos1")
commits2 <- get_commits("/path/to/repos2")

commits <- commits1 %>%
    dplyr::bind_rows(commits2) %>%
    dplyr::distinct(SHA, .keep_all = TRUE)

Each repository needs a category and a type. Categories can be broad projects/thesis chapters and I used Type to specify if the repository was mostly code or writing. I did this by printing all the repositories using this code:

cat(paste(sort(unique(commits$Repository)), collapse = "\n"))

Then copying that list into Excel and categorising each repository. There is probably a better/more R way to do it but this works. What you need at the end is a second repository tibble with the columns "Repository", "Category" and "Type".

You can now pass these two tibbles to the plot_commits() function.

commits_plot <- plot_commits(commits, repositories)

Change the other arguments to make sure you have the right category order/labels, colours etc. The label parameter labels the first commit of each repository with the (truncated) repository name.

The last step is to animate everything using animate_commits(). This is mostly pretty easy, the tricky part is getting the subtitle right.

animate_commits(commits_plot)

Save your animation as a git using gganimate::anim_save().

anim_save("commits.gif")

• Hopefully this is useful/interesting for some people.
• This code is not well tested, use at your own risk.
• I tried to make the functions as generic as possible but there may be some places where things specific to me are still there.
• I couldn't get any kind of enter tranistion to work for the points. I think it has something to do with having to give each point it's own group so they don't disappear. Solutions welcome.
• Thanks to everyone who wrote the packages I used and everyone who has posted tutorials/answered questions on the internet.