Question

Is there anyway to see how a file’s size has changed through time in a git repository? I want to see how my main.js file (which is the combination of several files and minified) has grown and shrunk over time.

Answer 1

You could create a script that uses the output from git show --pretty=raw <commit> to obtain the tree, then uses git ls-tree -r -l to obtain the blob you are looking for, including the file size.

In case you have ruby and the grit gem installed, here’s a little script I threw together:

require 'grit'

if ARGV.size < 1
  puts 'usage: file-size FILE'
  puts 'run from within the git repo root'
  exit
end

filename = ARGV[0].to_s

repo = Grit::Repo.new('.')
commits = repo.log('master', filename)
commits.each do |commit|
  blob = commit.tree/filename
  puts "#{commit} #{blob.size} bytes"
end

Example usage (filename of script is file-size.rb), will show you the history for somedir/somefile:

myproject$ ruby file-size.rb somedir/somefile