Easily Search Your GitHub Commit Messages
Hi IH,
I recently released an early release of my weekend project called GitLog.
I recently discovered you are unable to search GitLog commit messages when I was hoping to search for a fix I thought I had done when I hit a bug in another project.
The idea is that you set up a web hook within your repository on GitHub to send events to GitLog when you push to your repository. The web hook receives all of the commit messages each time you push and therefore allows you to search through your commit messages.
While its an MVP there are some limitations as I just wanted to do a proof of concept and see what demand there might be for a service like this.
Although you can import the existing GitHub commit messages when you get started, it limits it to the last 30 (the GitHub API default) and it limits you to 25 pushes being submitted via the webhook. The main reason for this is if I manage to get a lot of sign ups I didn't want to suddenly get a deluge of huge amounts of data and overload the servers that I currently have 😀
At the moment the repository web hook is manually set up for each repository you want to use GitLog with, but eventually if there is a demand for this type of service I hope to set this up automatically with the idea that it lists all of the repositories on your GH account and you can enable the ones you want and when you enable it, it automatically sets up the web hook and does the import.
You can check it out at https://gitlog.devso.io and sign ups are free using your GitHub account. Let me know what you think and any feedback then please let me know :)
What's the problem with searching commit messages?
For me, the search works perfectly on GitHub. Example
Furthermore, a
git log | grep -i mySearchTermusually does the trick for me.Oh yea I did know about that, meant to mention it but thought having a web serivce you can quickly log in to to search is easier than having to use a command line. Kind of winds me up having to do in terminal and remembering the commands all the time 🙂. Plus that relies on you having the project checked out locally (as far as I am aware at least) so having a web GUI is easier from that point of view.
Although at the moment its just basic search but the idea eventually it will be able to do more sophisticated searches potentially, like filtering by date, or by user which is much easier on a web GUI than a command line as command line searching can get complex and messy pretty quickly with more sophisticated searches.
Personally, as a developer I prefer the command line. When I don't have the repo checked out, I use GitHub's search or just quickly check it out. IDEs usually also have pretty powerful search functionality for Git.
Not sure if it's a hobby project for you or if you want to build it into a business. If the latter, I'd spend some time figuring out if it solves a real need for enough people before continuing to build. I've built too many projects just to figure out real users don't want to use it.
Its just an early stage at the moment I put together over a weekend just to see if there is any demand, I have had the feeling that there's not much lol. I got the idea when I automatically went to GitHub web GUI to do the search and found an Stackoverflow post where there was a question asking how to do it and it saying it wasn't possible (outisde the command line that you mentioned) and there were a few upvotes saying it was dumb for it to removed - although I did think it might not work out as it was quite an old post and the feature got removed from GitHub in 2013.
So perhaps not as good as idea as I had thought :)
Just to be clear: for me it works in GitHub's web GUI. :)
Is that doing the grep type command from the GitHub GUI as I was referring to a more generic friendly search via GitHub not a command line through their GUI?
Other than you can view history of commits and do a ctrl+F and search that way but you only get a limited number of entries, and you have to keep clicking older to view more entries so depending on how far back you want to search it could take a while to go back far enough so wouldn't consider that practical, or have you found another way to do the search via their GUI?
GitHub web UI.
You'll get to this page that shows you all the commits that have "Bump build" in the commit message.
well that's a bit of a face palm moment lol - I have no idea how I managed to miss that. I think I suspected that search was generic search for Github like different features or docs. I was looking around the settings for the repository and the commit history link.
I think that confirmed I've definetely not had a good idea
Github search is pretty good to be honest. :)
Happens to all of us. Good thing you found out early after just a weekend. You probably learned something from the project and can utilize that experience in the future. Good luck for Devso, Chris!
Yea it does look like it actually lol. It was a fun project none the less, made a nice change to work on something different. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction :).
You're welcome, @boardy!