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Code Swarm

Visualizes code collaboration from git repositories

See It In Action

Rails

Code Swarm - Rails

Apparently, in 2008 Rails switched to github. I see that pretty clearly :)

STC

Code Swarm - STC Shifts

Code Swarm - STC Reservations

STC usually only works in the summer. Sometimes Adam tweaks things during the year. Some people import more libraries than others.

Getting it working

I have a full gist that describes how I set it up; just a quick summary here.

I cloned this, and set up the prerequisites according to the README:

https://github.com/rictic/code_swarm

This commit broke everything for me, so reverted it. I don’t know enough python to come up with a better solution, but I put a note on their wiki page https://github.com/rictic/code_swarm/commit/f15334b162bd0f3f939f3879fbec1935bd094c8c

Then I ran the command code_swarm in the directory of my project.

Beautiful video appeared!

Getting Video Out

Then I edited the .config file (after running it once) so that it would record frames

# Save each frame to an image? TakeSnapshots=true

Then I followed these instructions to create the video (using ffmpeg, because that’s what I had already): http://code.google.com/p/codeswarm/wiki/GeneratingAVideo

ffmpeg -f image2 -r 24 -i %05d.png -sameq ./out.mov -pass 2

Built-in command for video

It looks like there’s a command code_swarm_video that would generate a video more easily, but it requires mencoder which I never got working.

Would this be easier if I just got mencoder working? Or would it be better to write-in a ffmpeg alternative?