I have an administration panel for my Rails application that shows various information. I’ve found it helpful to show the last few commits along with a link to the repository. Here’s the code:

Controller:

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@commits = Array.new
git = `git log -15 --abbrev-commit --pretty=format:"%H - %cr - %s - %d"`
git.split(/\n/).each do |commit|
  elements = commit.split(/ - /)
  @commits
    :hash => elements[0],
    :time => elements[1],
    :subject => elements[2],
    :refs => (elements[3] || "").match(/deploy_[^,]*/)
  }
end

The :refs never got used, I had thought that I’d tag all my deploys and be able to highlight them later, but it never ended up working out.

View: (It’s in HAML)

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 - @commits.each do |commit|
      %li
        = link_to truncate(commit[:subject], :length => 80), "http://git.example.com/git/myapp.git/commit/#{commit[:hash]}"
        = "(#{commit[:time]})"
        %b= commit[:refs]

It’s pretty simple, it just parses the output of git log and spits it out as a list, showing the description and how long ago it was checked in. If you have gitweb or something similar installed, you get a link to the repo.

It’s helped me to find production bugs, and also when I deploy without pushing my code to the git repo, and end up forgetting some changes!