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What are your recommendations for Git visualisation?

3 points by carmat ↗ HN
I like to think I'm well versed enough in how to use git, at least on a day-to-day basis. Having had plenty of experience with GitHub repos, both private and public, I now find myself in a situation whereby I should assume GitHub is not an option, and use 'self-hosted' repos.

With this, comes the difficulty in visualising progress, history and collaboration within a small team. Issues arise due to a no -standard, or non-existent, workflow (but that's for a different discussion).

I believe a visualisation tool would greatly help the team I work with, but with little experience outside of GitHub, I'm looking for advice from those that have used other tools.

e.g. Gitlab: to me, it looks like the answer, or at least something pretty close. But I don't want to commit to something, propose to my team, only to later discover a fundamental flaw or usage restrictions etc.

EDIT: An ideal feature would be the concept of pull requests or merge requests. Given the current team workflow, not every piece of work is to be released as soon as its completed so having some visualisation of things waiting on the wings is important.

Help in research would be grately appreciated.

Thanks community :)

6 comments

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matt4077
GitKraken is pretty nice, and free – but it's client software, not a web service.
carmat
I probably should have mentioned this in my original post (will amend) but does it handle things like feature/merge requests kind of like how GitHub and GitLab does?
matt4077
No, it's just a client, merge requests aren't part of a standard Git install so it wouldn't know where to even save them. (It does handle them when working with a Github repository).

For that Gitlab is certainly the best option – or a private repository at Github. I'd trust their security much more than anything I could roll myself.

carmat
Important point well made. Thank you
sdesol
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of GitSense which is focused on Git analytics and search

Right now it doesn't support analyzing/visualizing merges/pull requests, but it will down the road. What it does really well right now, is it lets you analyze changes across branches, which is a precursor to merge/pull requests analytics. Below is an example of how you can use it to analyze two branches from the rethinkdb project:

https://gitsense.com/insight?c=bitbucket:gitsense/contexts:g...

I write a bit more about how the tool works in the GitSense blog:

https://gitsense.com/blog

Right now I'm working on deep integration with Bitbucket and Microsoft, but you can use the standalone web tool, to analyze repos from GitHub/GitHub Enterprise, Bitbucket Cloud/Server or GitLab Server/Cloud. If GitHub and GitLab supports injection points in their product, I'll provide deep integration with them as well.