gittimelapse.py checks out git commits and takes screenshots of the web browser given a URL. I developed the script for myself because I thought it could be interesting to see the evolution of a web page in time. The ultimate idea is to create a video out of all the screenshots gittimelapse.py generates. I've created this one using iPhoto but I'd like to implement an automatic video creation probably using the opencv library.

gittimelapse.py requires selenium and pythongit. You can install them using pip:

$ pip install selenium
$ pip install gitpython

Make sure your run the web server. In this example a simple rails s will do:

$ rails s

Then run gittimelapse, it will store all the images into the relative path './files'. You can override the behaviour with the option --images-dir:

$ python gittimelapse.py -c /Users/johnlucas/Coding/mvpeers http://localhost:3000 
Getting Repo
Getting Head
Getting Commits
Taking Screenshots
Cleaning up...
Restoring original head (master)
$

The script will get the list of all your commits for your current branch, will fire a browser and take a screenshot of each commit checkout. Eventually it will restore the original HEAD.

The default browser is Firefox because WebDriver doesn't need an extra binary for that. If you want to use chrome you need to download the driver binary and put it in your PATH and then run gittimelapse.py with the -c or --chrome option:

python gittimelapse.py -c /Users/johnlucas/Dropbox/Coding/mvpeers/ http://localhost:3000