Repository Activity View

[thispaul]

Use this discussion to provide feedback about the Repos Activity View

[beingminimal]

@thispaul I would love to have access for this feature. Let me know how I can get it for my two org in github. Thanks

[thispaul]

Hi @beingminimal right now we are testing this feature with a few customers. We will announce a wider release in the near future. Thanks for your patience!

[beingminimal]

@thispaul alright, any timeline?

[thispaul]

Hi @beingminimal the Activity View feature is now generally available!

[AnandChowdhary]

Is there any way for us to know that this branch was deleted because the PR was merged (and auto-delete after merging is enabled)? Without that context, it looks scary (e.g., could've been unintentional).

[thispaul]

Hi @AnandChowdhary thanks for the feedback. We will work on improving this to make it less scary!

[sblolga2020]

good idea

[samdark]

1. Commits aren't linked.
2. Merges don't have a branch name these were merged from.

[samdark]

[samdark]

As for the popup modal w/ extra info... well, I wasn't aware it's there :) I'd expect it right in the main screen since that's very important info.

[rmacklin]

@thispaul I also expected this part to be a link:

Considering that if we manually paste a SHA range in a GitHub comment, e.g.:

the rendered GFM automatically turns it into a link:

it feels inconsistent that the SHA range in the Activity View is not a link

[omalyshe]

Hi, we'd like to see who changed the branch protection rules for a particular branch.

[thispaul]

Hi @omalyshe this information should already be in the audit log. It's a feature for enterprise customers

[omalyshe]

@thispaul Thanks for your answer. The problem is that the audit log is available only on the organization level but not for a repo admins.

[thispaul]

Thanks for the clarification. We will take this feedback into consideration in our upcoming product design

[creeper-0910]

I feel it is dangerous to be able to see the contents of force push for repositories that have nothing to do with the user.
Some users will use force push to delete api keys or other information they have mistakenly entered.
Why not allow only the user who manages the repository to see the history of force pushes?

[ghost]

I agree. My older activity doxxes me and exposes accidental pushes that I've since rebased. Why not allow maintainers to delete activity? Right now, my only option is to completely delete my repository, create a new one, then push my repository to it to hide these commits.

[mxmlnkn]

I have the same fears. I use force-push quite often. Not often to remove credentials, but still, in general, I don't want anyone to see those older commits anymore. An option in the settings to turn Activity off would be necessary.

[std-microblock]

If the functionality cannot be disabled or certain elements of the history eradicated, an unfavorable incident, such as having to expunge the repository in order to eliminate the exposed API key, may very well ensue.

[creeper-0910]

Are the developers really watching this thread?

[atifcppprogrammer]

Yes, it would really be helpful if visibility to force pushes was restricted to owner of the repository itself, please do something about this.

[jjliggett]

Could we please have the ability to display more activity results per page (e.g. 10, 20, 50, 100)? For very active repositories, 10 activities is very small and could require paging through several pages if you want to see all recent activities.

[rszyma]

+1, another idea would be lazy-load more results when scrolled to the bottom

[mikerockett]

I like the lazy-loading idea more, in general, but a sensible default that is higher that the current would also work well. Another idea might be to show it as a simple timeline with lazy-loading.

◯ – Today
  ⊕ - details
  ⊕ - details
  ⊕ - details

◯ – Yesterday
  ⊕ - details
  ⊕ - details

◯ – (formatted date)
  ⊕ - details

[gordey4doronin]

Lazy load more results (i.e. infinite scrolling) is a great idea indeed!

Although with typical infinite scrolling implementation one won't be able to reference to a specific Activity page using query-string params (e.g. to share some specific activity with their colleagues or just to store some state and re-find it later).

[ghost]

It miss the Vigilant badge who tell if push was signed or not.

[dezren39]

i'd love if it had some graphs / analytics

[dezren39]

an 'undo' button for each activity :-)

[ph00lt0]

i'd like an option to disable this.

[dnhn]

Or at least make it private only for repository owner.

[kalinochkind]

The only useful Gitlab feature that was missing on GitHub, thanks for implementing it finally

[mikerockett]

Whilst the commit log is always grouped by a single branch, I do agree – a similar UX would do well.

[ashkulz]

Is there an API for extracting this data? It's very useful to see what's going on.

[thispaul]

We are working on an API and will release that soon

[Haresh-729]

Use this discussion to provide feedback about the Repos Activity View

can you add a pictorial display as this will help a lot which will have a drop down to select different fields to be displayed in the chart as number of additions by each user, commits, deletions of required period of time etc.

[finnbear]

In addition to adding an opt-opt, please ensure that activity while a repository is Private is cleared or hidden if the repository is changed to Public. Otherwise, pre-force-push commits can get leaked despite the repository being Private at the time, which is unintuitive.

[ljharb]

I'm going to echo all the things said above; if I've forced pushed out a commit, that's because I want that commit expunged from the internet as fast and widely as possible - whether it's got secrets in it, or whether it's just a silly typo. This must not be public info by default, and it must allow me to delete/clear/purge unreachable commits from the view.

[AvatharBehemoth]

OK i deleted this branch. And it exists. Gitbash cant find the ur. Yet it exists. Why cant i delete the "default" branch which is called "Default" sometimes by github and sometimes "default".
This is insane. The whole system just DOES NOT WORK. Github is terrible. Basically unusable. Thank you microsoft for destroying yet another thing.

[LinqLover]

A branch is just a pointer to a commit. Deleting a branch is not a guarantee to delete the from-this-time unreferenced branch. Nowhere. However, I understand that some people might have this assumption. Maybe GitHub should offer a button for manually triggering its GC.

[AvatharBehemoth]

Hey thanks for the reply.So a pointer to nothing should be deletable. It should disapear.
It did not.
Also: gitbash could not find the url. But adding files manually, with some occasional weird effects (404 not found after hitting commit sometimes) did work.
So basically automating adding the files didnt work, cloning the master branch, wasnt possible. making a pull request and merging wasnt possible.
What do you think happened?

[Davi2929]

Uploading duo_e2ee.pdf…

[eraofbusiness]

Era of Business

[unaimillan]

Feedback:

For me personally it was very hard to find this exact page, where I could see all the commits in the repository and look through the overall repo activity. The small size of heartbeat icon doesn't help to find out about this feature.

I would be very happy to see the link to the Activity page in the "Insights" tab of the repository. Probably after Contributors and before Community.
And also, I would really appreciate if at the bottom of the page, there will be buttons "Go to the latest"/"Go to the most recent" activity. So I will be able to very quickly understand how the repository have started and return back.

[Davi2929]

Hey thanks for the reply.So a pointer to nothing should be deletable. It should disapear. It did not. Also: gitbash could not find the url. But adding files manually, with some occasional weird effects (404 not found after hitting commit sometimes) did work. So basically automating adding the files didnt work, cloning the master branch, wasnt possible. making a pull request and merging wasnt possible. What do you think happened?

[mauricesharp-okta]

The page is not that useful as it's incomplete. I've been going through the SDK and library repositories in the /okta tree and many are missing a significant number of commits. I had to resort to the git commands to find the information I needed.

[mauricesharp-okta]

I've been trying to use this page for upwards of 30 repositories in order to find out the last time actual work was done on the code (rather than say a version update of some include.) It works in about 25% of the cases. Otherwise I have to use Git commands.

For my uses this page needs to reflect the lifetime of commits, not those in some arbitrary horizon of time. For now I'll be using Git instead of this page.

[victor]

This is wrong. All contributions are attributed to the same user. Please fix.

[story645]

I'm trying to use this to clean up PRs merged into the repo I forked from - is there anyway to make that information more visible? or am I just using the tool wrong?

[TomW-Skyline]

Would be nice if the commit hashes would be a link. Currently you need to copy-paste them in order to see what has changed.

[roman-aguilera]

It would be very helpful to see the date and time that a change was made, without having to hover over the part that says how long ago the change was made (e.g "2 weeks ago")

[queenofcorgis]

Thank you everyone who provided feedback. If you'd like to share feedback or ask questions about the Repository Activity View, please open a new discussion!