git-time-hooks

A pair of git hooks to automatically track time spent in feature development.

My blog post is here, which describes the motivation and how it works.

TL;DR

These hooks automatically add time tracking commit messages when you merge a feature branch. You can use this time data to infer entropy in your process/code.

$ git log -1
commit 75c017e90eb491f9a6901aea41aed4f9317ff4ee (HEAD -> main)
Merge: 412cab8 2a97c3a
Author: Doug Bridgens 
Date:   Fri Apr 4 10:36:37 2025 +0100

    Merge branch 'feat_githooks'
    
    Time spent on feat_githooks: 0d:0h:3m secs=194

Here I can see how many days I've spent editing code on the webui component in the past month:

$ git log --since="1 month ago" | grep Time | grep webui | cut -f2 -d= | paste -s -d+ - | bc | paste -s -ds - | sed -e 's/$/\/60\/60\/24/g'  | bc
4

Install

You can simply copy the two hooks into ./git/hooks/ and make them executable. Or use a Makefile to automate the process.

$ cat Makefile 
HOOKS= \
	   https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thisdougb/git-time-hooks/main/commit-msg \
	   https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thisdougb/git-time-hooks/main/prepare-commit-msg

githooks:
	@cd .git/hooks && \
	for i in $(HOOKS); do \
		echo "installing git hook $$i"; \
		curl -sO $$i; \
		chmod +x "`echo $$i | rev | cut -f1 -d'/' | rev`"; \
	done

$ make githooks
installing git hook https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thisdougb/git-time-hooks/main/commit-msg
installing git hook https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thisdougb/git-time-hooks/main/prepare-commit-msg

Changelog

22 Apr 2025

A minor fix to catch a printed error from commit-msg when run on the very first repo commit, when reflog does not yet exist.

04 Apr 2025

Refactored to make the hooks add time data into the merge commit messages. This is cleaner and a little bit simpler.

28 Mar 2025

Initial git hooks, creating tags to store the time data.