How to use Activity extension of Mercurial

The Punchcard extension of Mercurial can be used to obtain a calendar chart of your contributions to a repository, as shown in here. If you need to view the classic line graph of activities in a Mercurial repository, then the Activity extension is a great solution.

• This extension uses Matplotlib and requires a recent version. Matplotlib that ships with Ubuntu is typically ancient, so uninstall that and install the latest using pip:

$ sudo apt-get purge python-matplotlib python-matplotlib-data
$ sudo pip install --upgrade matplotlib

• Clone the repository of the Activity extension to get the latest source code:

$ hg clone http://sources.freehackers.org/Hgactivity/

• Add lines to your hgrc to use this extension:

[extensions]
activity=/path/to/Hgactivity/activity

• To view line graph of activities on your repository in an interactive GUI:

$ hg activity --mode=gui

You can view commits, branches, tags and users. Activities across different files and directories can be viewed by choosing options in the GUI.

• To generate an image file named activity.png of this line graph:

$ hg activity --mode=file

• If you find yourself using one of these activity options a lot, you could create an alias for it by adding these lines to your hgrc:

[alias]
gact = activity --mode=gui

After this, you can use the alias instead of the more verbose form:

$ hg gact

Tried with: Mercurial 2.8.2, Matplotlib 1.5.0 and Ubuntu 14.04