git-standup — See What Your Team Committed Yesterday

Introduction

git-standup is a small command-line utility that answers a simple question: what did I (or my team) work on recently? It parses git logs to display commits grouped by author and date, making it useful for daily standups, weekly summaries, or just remembering what you did last Friday.

What git-standup Does

• Displays commits from the last working day by default, skipping weekends intelligently
• Filters by author name or email to see a specific team member's activity
• Scans multiple repositories in a directory to give a cross-project summary
• Supports custom date ranges for weekly or sprint-based reviews
• Shows commit hashes, messages, and timestamps in a clean terminal output

Architecture Overview

git-standup is a single shell script that wraps git log with date and author filters. It calculates the correct start date based on the current day of the week (skipping to Friday if run on Monday). When scanning multiple repos, it walks the directory tree looking for .git folders and runs the log query in each one. No server, database, or background process is involved.

Self-Hosting & Configuration

• Install via Homebrew, npm (npm install -g git-standup), or copy the script into your PATH
• No configuration files are required; all options are passed as command-line flags
• Use -a to filter by author, -d for number of days, -D for a directory of repos
• Set -w "MON-FRI" to customize which days count as working days
• Alias it in your shell config for quick access (e.g., alias standup="git standup")

Key Features

• Weekday-aware: running on Monday automatically shows Friday's work
• Multi-repo scanning finds all git repositories under a given directory
• Supports displaying all branches or just the current one
• GPG-signed commit indicators are preserved in the output
• Zero dependencies beyond git and a POSIX shell

Comparison with Similar Tools

• git log --since — achieves the same result but requires remembering the date syntax each time
• git-extras (git summary) — provides aggregate stats; git-standup focuses on recent commit activity by person
• Geekbot / Standuply — Slack-based standup bots; git-standup pulls directly from commit history without requiring manual input
• GitHub activity feed — browser-based and limited to GitHub; git-standup works with any git remote

FAQ

Q: Does it show uncommitted work? A: No. It only reports commits that have been made to the repository.

Q: Can I use it in a CI pipeline for reporting? A: Yes. Its plain-text output can be piped to Slack webhooks, email, or log files.

Q: How does it handle merge commits? A: Merge commits appear in the output like any other commit. Use --merges or --no-merges git flags if you want to filter them.

Q: Does it work with shallow clones? A: Yes, as long as the shallow history includes the date range you are querying.

Sources

• https://github.com/kamranahmedse/git-standup
• https://kamranahmed.info