vic / lolcommits

Takes a snapshot with your webcam every time you git commit code, and archives a lolcat style image with it.

lolcommits (git + webcam = lol)

lolcommits takes a snapshot with your webcam every time you git commit code, and archives a lolcat style image with it. Git blame has never been so much fun.

By default, the lolimages are stored by a Github style short SHA in a ~/.lolcommits directory created for you.

Sample images

Please add your own lolcommit! Add to the People Using Lolcommits page on the Wiki.

Installation

Mac OS X

You'll need ImageMagick installed. Homebrew makes this easy. Simply do:

brew install imagemagick

Then simply do:

[sudo] gem install lolcommits

(If you're using RVM, you can/should probably omit the sudo, but the default MacOSX Ruby install is dumb and requires it.)

Linux

Install dependencies using your package manager of choice, for example in Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install mplayer imagemagick libmagickwand-dev

Then install the lolcommits gem:

gem install lolcommits

For more details, see Installing on Linux.

Windows

Here be dragons! It all works but you'll need some more detailed instructions to get the dependencies installed. See the wiki page for Installing on Windows.

Usage

Enabling and basic usage

From within any git repository, simply do a lolcommits --enable. From that point on, any git commit will automatically trigger a lolcommit capture! All lolcommits are stored in ~/.lolcommits by default, placed in a subdirectory by project name, and with a filename matching the commit hash.

Don't worry about it too much, half the fun of lolcommits is forgetting it's installed!

Other commands

Ok, if you insist... Since you know about --enable, common sense suggest there is also a repository specific --disable, hopefully you can guess what that does. Other handy common commands include --last, which will open for display your most recent lolcommit image, or --browse, which pops open the directory containing all the lolcommit images for your current repository. You can always do --help for a full list of available commands.

Configuration variables

lolcommits has some options for additional lulz. You can enable via environment variables.

• Set webcam device on mac - set LOLCOMMITS_DEVICE environment variable.
• Set delay persistently (for slow to warmup webcams) - set LOLCOMMITS_DELAY var to time in seconds.
• Set font file location - set LOLCOMMITS_FONT environment variable.
• Animated gifs - set LOLCOMMITS_ANIMATE=3 (currently Mac/OSX only and requires ffmpeg).
• Fork lolcommits runner - set LOLCOMMITS_FORK environment variable (causes capturing command to fork to a new process, speedily returning you to your terminal).

For the full list, see the configuration variables.

Animated Gif Capturing

Animated gifs (Mac/OSX only) can take a while to generate (depending on the number of seconds you capture and the capabilities of your machine). ffmpeg is required and can be installed with brew like so;

brew install ffmpeg

To enable, just set the LOLCOMMITS_ANIMATE environment variable with the number of seconds to capture. And like regular image captures you can use the env variables LOLCOMMITS_DEVICE and LOLCOMMITS_DELAY to change the capture device or delay time (seconds) before capturing. If you find capturing an animated gif takes too long, try setting the LOLCOMMITS_FORK=true env variable.

Plugins

There are a growing amount of plugins for lolcommits to enable things like Twitter upload, translating your commit messages to lolspeak, etc. Check them out on the plugins wiki page.

Troubles?

Started a FAQ.

Timelapse?

To watch your face as it decays while you program, you can create a quick mpeg of all your lolcommits snapshots (if you have imagemagick and ffmpeg installed):

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