It is very common nowadays for companies to have a big when not a huge amount of code in their repositories and, if we are lucky, all this code will be split across multiple projects and repositories. In addition to this, it is very common in this company environments that no one owns an specific project, people just work in their tasks and sometimes they change multiple projects. This environment produces a situation where when you have questions about an specific project you do not know exactly who is the best person to ask.
There is not a simple solution to solve that but, if you are using git as a version control system, one possible solution is to obtain the top committers of the project. We can do this easily with a very simple command:
git shortlog -s -n --all | head -3
This will show us the first three top committers for our project. But, we are developers, we are lazy and we like to automate and build scripts to cover more than the simple case. Then, we can build this script:
#!/bin/bash print_help() { echo " Do you need help or knowledge about one of our projects? Who is the better person to ask about one of them? Here you can find it! TOPCOMMITTERS(1) NAME topcommitters - list top committers in the git projects SYNOPSIS topcommitters [OPTION]... [PROJECT]... DESCRIPTION List top committers in the git projects There are not mandatory arguments. By default top 5 committers in all projects are listed. -f, --folder location of the repositories. By default ~/sourcecode -c, --count number of committers listed. By default 5 -p, --project single project to be listed. ie: deliveries-service -h, --help show this help message. Exit status: 0 if OK, AUTHOR Written by fjavierm. REPORTING BUGS www.binarycoders.wordpress.com BSD 1 July, 2018 BSD " } show_multiple() { # Loop all sub-directories for f in $dir do show_single $f done } show_single() { f=$1 # Only interested in directories [ -d "${f}" ] || return echo -en "\033[0;35m" echo -n "${f}" echo -en "\033[0m" # Check if directory is a git repository inside_git_repo="$f/$(git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree 2>/dev/null)" if [ "$inside_git_repo" ]; then cd $f basename=${PWD} dirlen=${#basename} # list top authors echo -en "\n" git shortlog -s -n --all -- . | head -${count} cd ../ else echo -ne "\t\t\tNot a git repository" fi echo } POSITIONAL=() while [[ $# -gt 0 ]] do key="$1" case $key in -f|--folder) FOLDER="$2" shift # past argument shift # past value ;; -c|--count) COUNT="$2" shift # past argument shift # past value ;; -p|--project) PROJECT="$2" shift # past argument shift # past value ;; -h|--help) print_help exit 0 ;; *) # unknown option POSITIONAL+=("$1") # save it in an array for later shift # past argument ;; esac done set -- "${POSITIONAL[@]}" # restore positional parameters dir="$FOLDER" count="$COUNT" # No directory has been provided, use default if [ -z "$dir" ] then dir="${HOME}/sourcecode" fi # No count has been provided, use 5 if [ -z "$count" ] then count="5" fi # Make sure directory ends with "/" if [[ $dir != */ ]] then dir="$dir/*" else dir="$dir*" fi if [ -z "$PROJECT" ] then show_multiple else show_single $dir$PROJECT fi exit 0
Basically the script executes almost the same command we have seen at the beginning but it offers us a few more options.
We can list all the projects at once in our default folder ~/sourcecode:
./topcommitters.sh
We can see the help text:
./topcommitters.sh -h
We can specify where our projects are:
./topcommitters.sh -f ~/mycode
We can select where the projects are, which concrete project do we want and how many committers we want to see:
./topcommitters.sh -f ~/mycode -p ecommerce -c 3
One interesting feature is that, as you can notice, the command in the script is slightly different to the original command:
Original: git shortlog -s -n --all | head -3
Script: git shortlog -s -n --all -- . | head -${count}
This difference gives us the possibility to list committers in a folder inside the git repository even if that folder is not the repository folder. For example, imagine we have the next project structure:
big-project
-- .git
-- 3rd-party-apis
Imagine that we want to obtain information about the facebook project. If we just execute “./topcommitters.sh -p big-project” we will obtain the top committers for the whole project and this is not what we want but, with the modification of the original command in the script, we are allowed to execute “./topcommitters.sh -p big-project/facebook” and obtain the exact information we want.