How to export git history in PDF

A friend recently asked me if I knew a trick to generate a somehow clean PDF of a git history, as he needed to share that to a non-technical person.

I used to dig into git history a lot to generate git graphs in the browser (although I don’t maintain this project anymore). So I know some tricks indeed.

The git CLI is a goldmine that’s overlooked. You can retrieve many things from git log, as long as you play around with the options.

Generate a PDF from git history

The first step is to generate a text file from the logs:

git --no-pager log --graph --all --oneline > git-history.txt

Then, you can either convert that .txt into a PDF using an online service (if data is not sensitive): http://www.convertfiles.com/converter.php

Or you can use libreoffice if you don’t want to send your history to some online web converter (thank you @mcassard 👍):

libreoffice --convert-to "pdf" git-history.txt

Let’s decompose the git command

I think this is a good excuse to learn some git options. These can be useful in other contexts:

• git --no-pager tells git to not use a pager, so we can get all of the history in one file
• log --graph tells the log command to draw a graph representation, because that’s what we’re looking for (we want to see the branches!)
• --all will show all commits from all branches (local and remote tracking) and tags, everything 👐
• --oneline is a shorthand that abbreviates commits and renders a compact version of the graph (so it’s digestible on a PDF file)

To learn more about git log options, you can have a look at the docs. But it can feel a bit abstract. I recommend you fiddling with the options in a git project to really understand what’s going on!