What is github-visualize?

github-visualize is a self-hosted dashboard that watches your GitHub repositories and turns their history into animated visual replays, inspired by charts seen in a well-known engineering blog post. For each repository you add, it shows a replay of the commit timeline with lines added and deleted over time, a heatmap of which hours of the day commits tend to happen, and a race-style view of GitHub Actions workflow runs lighting up green or red as they complete. A dashboard overview page lists all monitored repos with activity summaries and lets you add new ones by typing an owner and repository name. The animations play automatically as you scroll them into view, can be replayed on demand, and respect a setting some people use to reduce motion on screen. The tool is built with Ruby on Rails, using SQLite as its database and a background job system called Solid Queue instead of requiring a separate Redis server, which keeps the setup simple. It talks to GitHub's API as efficiently as possible, fetching commit history in bulk and syncing more frequently for actively updated repositories than for quiet ones. Running it requires a GitHub access token with permission to read the repositories you want to track, and there is no built-in user login in this version, so the README recommends only running it on a trusted network such as a home network or VPN, or adding optional HTTP Basic authentication and a host allowlist if it needs to be reachable more broadly. The easiest way to try it is to run the published Docker image with a single command, though a docker-compose setup and a one-command deploy script for your own server are also provided. The project includes automated tests, security scanning, and dependency auditing as part of its continuous integration setup.