GitGraph Live — a live commit graph and a branch graveyard for GitHub (open-source extension)

internetgodf — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 17:55:05 +0000

internetgodf / GitGraphLive

GitGraph Live

Live commit graph + stale branch radar for GitHub · Русский ниже

What it adds to GitHub

🗂 Graph tab — a colorful commit graph for the last 40 commits of any repository each branch gets its own colored line, merges curve into the trunk, the trunk is always on the left (like git log --graph). Hover any dot for «author · message».

🪦 Branches tab — every branch ranked by last activity: ✅ alive · ⏳ no commits for 14+ days · 🪦 abandoned for 30+ days. Click a branch to open it on GitHub.

Install (ZIP)

Download the ZIP from Releases
Unzip it into a folder
Open chrome://extensions (Brave: brave://extensions, Edge: edge://extensions)
Enable Developer mode (top right)
Load unpacked → select the unzipped folder
Open any GitHub repository → click the floating ⎇ button (bottom right)

Optional: click…

View on GitHub

Working with big GitHub repos, I kept hitting the same wall: there's no way to see the commit history as a graph, and old zombie branches hide in plain sight. So I built GitGraph Live — a small Chromium extension that adds a live commit graph and a stale-branch radar right onto every GitHub repo page.

🗂 Graph tab

Commit graph for the last 40 commits, one colored line per branch
Trunk always on the left, exactly like git log --graph; merges curve into it
▶ Play the history — a timelapse animation: the graph grows commit by commit, oldest to newest, with a traveling cursor (1x/2x/4x speed)

🪦 Branches tab

Every branch ranked by last activity: ✅ alive · ⏳ 14+ days quiet · 🪦 30+ days stale
New in v0.5: ↓/↑ badges — how far each branch is behind (or ahead of) the default branch, one compare API call per branch
A summary line points at the biggest gap in the repo

Real example — running it on microsoft/vscode-cpptools (100 branches): 95 have been dead for over a month, the oldest keeper is 6+ years old and ~2,000 commits behind main. GitHub never surfaces this anywhere.

❤ Privacy & data economy

Reads only the public GitHub API (60 req/hour), with a 10-minute cache — re-opening a panel costs 0 requests
Optional personal token (lives in your browser's localStorage, nothing is sent anywhere else) → 5,000 req/hour
No analytics, no tracking

Install

Grab the ZIP from the latest release, then chrome://extensions → Developer mode → Load unpacked. Source code is MIT and fully open — PRs welcome!

What would you like to see next — search/filters for the graveyard, or a light theme?

DEV Community: internetgodf