GitTail

A command-line utility written in Python that watches a set of Git repositories and sends notifications via Growl or Libnotify when new commits are spotted.

GitTail can help emphasize the social aspect of coding. It can be a useful tool for teams of developers in that it encourages awareness of and interaction around code as it is being written, in an opt-in fashion per individual and per given moment.

Git's distributed nature means you are not locked in to a single central service. If somebody shares their Git repo with you, you can watch it with GitTail.

GitTail can watch:

• Remote repositories accessible over SSH - provided that git log can be executed on the remote host.

• Local repositories - useful if you have local copies of the interesting repos which are somehow kept up to date, for example by a script that runs "git fetch" regularly or if a shared filesystem is mounted, which your colleagues push to.

INSTALLATION

If you've downloaded the source repository, run

git submodule update --init

to fetch the dependencies.

Alter config.py to suit your needs. Or create a custom config file and load it via the -c option. Configure the path for at least one Git repository.

GitTail uses SSH to execute git log on a remote server to gather data. Hence you need to set up key based SSH authentication for all SSH hosts you've asked GitTail to watch, to avoid repeated password prompts.

Follow the platform specific instructions below.

Start the watchdog with:

python path-to-gittail/gittail.py -c yourconfigfile.py

OS X

Install Growl available at http://growl.info

Git is required for local repo support.

The gntp submodule requires Growl 2. The Growl team appears to only distribute Growl 2 builds via Apple's App Store.

If you need compatibility with 1.x builds of Growl, which are currently distributed via Google Code and linked to on growl.info's download page, try installing these bindings: https://code.google.com/p/growl/source/browse/Bindings/python?name=maintenance-1.2 GitTail will prefer the older bindings if they exist in the path. A downside with the older bindings is that they appear not to support url callbacks.

Linux

GitTail attempts to use Libnotify by default, via the Python module gi.repository.Notify.

Git is required for local repo support.

Windows

For remote repositories, GitTail attempts to execute the shell command ssh. For local repositories, GitTail needs a proper shell that supports conditionals, loops, ls etc. The repo analysis is done using git log.

This can be accomplished on Windows by running GitTail via Cygwin. Install the corresponding Cygwin packages (OpenSSH, Git) depending on which GitTail features you intend to use. If you don't have Python installed Cygwin can provide it too. http://cygwin.org

Some Cygwin related notes:

• When Git is installed via Cygwin, it does not know which root CA:s to trust and refuses to fetch https urls, which is inconvenient if you are cloning the GitTail source repository directly, since its submodules refer to https urls. One solution is to trust the CA:s provided by the "ca-certificates" Cygwin package.

• The "screen" package allows you to run GitTail in the background.

  1. Start the Cygwin terminal
  2. Start screen: screen
  3. Start GitTail:

     python path-to/gittail/gittail.py -c yourconfigfile.py
     

  4. Detach from screen with the keyboard sequence ctrl-A D
  5. Close the Cygwin terminal

  GitTail is now running in the background without a distracting taskbar item. To re-attach to the screen, open Cygwin and run: screen -x

To get notifications, install Growl for Windows. http://code.google.com/p/growl-for-windows/