Lolcommits at Play

A continuation of my previous post, Lolcommits at Work...

Sharing is caring. Why stash all these awesome Lolcommits away in your hard drive, never to see the light of day? Let's upload our gifs to the GitHub repo and include links to them in our commit messages!

(Okay, maybe not for shared work repositories, but personal projects? Heck yeah!)

Perusing the issues page on Lolcommits, I came across much of the code to do this. Here's how:

Your post-commit file
You could throw all the code into the post-commit file itself, but that would get too complicated when the day comes that I want to execute multiple scripts following a git commit. Instead, I'll just call append-lol.rb. Yes, that's right, you can write git hooks in Ruby!

You don't need lines 2 and 3 if you're not using Ruby Version Manager. If you are using RVM, make sure you use something you actually have installed.

On line 4, put in the path to your repo's hooks folder /append-lols.rb.

append-lols.rb
Finally, you can use this append-lols.rb file as is. Save it in your repo's .git/hooks folder. I've commented extensively so that you may follow along.

Now you're ready to commit! Once you've pushed, you should have a shiny new lolcommits folder in your repository's root and a lovely commit message linking to your gif, like this one!

Lolcommits at Work

Last week, I gave a presentation on git hooks for my company's Hack Day. It was well received so I thought I'd do a little write up for anyone who would like to implement them in their development project.

The shiny happy people of Visible Measures!

What is a git hook?
An additional script you can execute when you git commit. Find out more.

Lolcommits

Lolcommits is a nifty little ruby gem by Matthew Rothenberg.  With Lolcommits, every time you git commit your built-in webcam will take and save a picture! In the top right of this picture will be the first bit of the commit's Secure Hash Algorithm and in the bottom will be your commit message. All the install and usage instructions for Lolcommits can be found on Github.

The git hook
Running lolcommits --enable from the terminal, whilst inside a git repository will create a file called post-commit in the hidden subdirectory .git/hooks. That file contains:

With this file in place, every time you git commit, the lolcommits --capture command will also run. Modify the post-commit file for fun gifs.


3 is the length of time, in seconds, that your camera will capture images. "Fork," forks the process so as not to tie up your terminal.

Timelapse
All your images are stored as jpgs (or gifs) in ~/.lolcommits/<your-repository-name>. You can create a timelapse of jpegs easily if you cd into that directory and run 

convert `find . -type f -name "*.jpg" -print0 | xargs -0 ls -tlr | awk '{print $9}'` timelapse.mpeg

I can't wait to document my career at Visible Measures with a super-awesome timelapse!