git-today: A Script to Help Me Fill Out Daily Report

leishanglin Updated：2025-03-01

Created：2025-03-01

Background

Our company requires us to write a daily report every day. Sometimes, this becomes a tedious task because it’s easy to forget exactly what we’ve done. Fortunately, as developers, we naturally leave traces of our work: through git messages. So, I decided to write a bash script using git log to help me fill out my daily report.

Implementation Process

Creating the Script

First, I created the script in a git repository for testing purposes:

cd ~/Project/local/vue-playground
touch ./git-today.sh
chmod +x ./git-today.sh
vim ./git-today.sh

Then, I used git log --author="xxx" to get my commit history:

#!/bin/bash

USER=$(git config user.name)
git log --author="$USER"

This will output something like this:

bash-3.2$ ./git-today.sh
commit c5cb1523390b0339581ee31ade23d14650a80ec4 (HEAD -> main)
Author: leishanglin <reasonly8@sina.com>
Date:   Sat Mar 1 07:52:45 2025 +0800

    feat: Remove code related to @vitejs/plugin-vue

commit b52bc6c45d163fe5ecd4c93cb90d30cfd2c756e6
Author: leishanglin <reasonly8@sina.com>
Date:   Sat Mar 1 07:51:22 2025 +0800

    feat: Set up vue alias for a build version that supports template compiler

commit 2f56f4f160bde411551f210b0b96ee9ee8b84584
Author: leishanglin <reasonly8@sina.com>
Date:   Wed Feb 26 13:31:53 2025 +0800

    init

The output is fine, but not quite optimal. First, it includes too much unnecessary information. Second, it doesn’t limit the results to “only today’s commits.”

Streamlining and Filtering

To address these two issues, I made improvements to the script:

#!/bin/bash

# Get today's date
TODAY=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)

# Get the current user's name
USER=$(git config user.name)

# Filter git log to get today's commit records
git log --author="$USER" --since="$TODAY 00:00" --until="$TODAY 23:59" --oneline

Explanation:

date +%Y-%m-%d is a command to get the current date in YYYY-MM-DD format, e.g., 2025-03-01.
git config user.name retrieves my git username to filter the logs.
--since and --until are used to get today’s records, and --oneline makes the output more concise.

When I run the script, I get output like this:

bash-3.2$ ./git-today.sh
c5cb152 (HEAD -> main) feat: Remove code related to @vitejs/plugin-vue
b52bc6c feat: Set up vue alias for a build version that supports template compiler

This is the ideal output. We can copy and paste this information to fill out the daily report.

Creating a Symlink

Currently, this script is only in a specific repository (vue-playground), and it’s not very portable. So, I need to register it globally so that I can call it from anywhere.

sudo ln -s /Users/leishanglin/Projects/local/git-today/git-today.sh /usr/bin/gt

I created a symlink gt in the /usr/bin/ directory, so now I can execute the gt command from anywhere to achieve the same result.

Note:

The operation implicitly assumes that the git-today.sh script was moved to the /git-today/ directory.
When creating the symlink, make sure to use the absolute path.

Finally, let’s test it:

➜ gt
c5cb152 (HEAD -> main) feat: Remove code related to @vitejs/plugin-vue
b52bc6c feat: Set up vue alias for a build version that supports template compiler

Well, it basically achieves the effect I was looking for.