A GitHub repo visualizer that draws trees, not bar charts

Ringwood is a GitHub repo visualizer that reads a project's commit history and draws it as the cross-section of a tree. Every calendar year the repo was active becomes one growth ring. The ring's width comes from how many commits landed that year, scaled against the repo's own busiest year, and the color bands inside it come from the languages those commits actually touched. Paste a repo, watch the rings grow outward one year at a time, and export the finished trunk as a PNG.

Most ways to visualize git history end up looking identical: a contribution heatmap, a commit-frequency line chart, a wall of green squares. They are accurate and completely forgettable. Growth rings are a format people already know how to read without a legend. A wide ring was a good year. A thin one was a quiet year. A repo that went dormant for two years and came back carries those lean years as visible scars instead of dropping them from the chart.

How it reads a repository

Everything runs in your browser against the public GitHub REST API. Ringwood pages through the repo's commits, buckets them by year, then samples a handful of commits from each year to work out which file types were being touched. Ring thickness is scaled by the square root of a year's commit share rather than linearly, because a ring's visible area grows faster than its thickness the further out it sits, and linear scaling makes recent years look far bigger than they were.

Questions

What is a GitHub repo visualizer?

Any tool that turns a repository's activity into a picture instead of a list of commits. Most draw calendars or graphs. Ringwood draws a tree trunk, so the whole life of the project reads as a single image you can post.

How do I visualize git history for my own project?

Paste owner/repo or the GitHub URL into the box above and press Grow. There is no signup, no install, and no access token. If the repository is public, it works.

Does this commit history visualization tool support private repos?

No. Ringwood only makes anonymous requests, so it can reach public repositories only. Nothing you paste leaves your browser except the API call to github.com.

Why did it stop partway through a large repository?

GitHub allows 60 anonymous API requests per hour per IP address, and a repo with decades of history needs several pages. History is fetched newest first, so hitting that ceiling still leaves a real tree: Ringwood draws the rings it managed to read and says on the status line that you are looking at a recent slice rather than the full history.

Which repositories are worth trying?

torvalds/linux has more than thirty rings and a visibly thickening trunk. facebook/react shows a language shift as the bands change color. Your own side project from four years ago is usually the one that surprises you.