Fetch History

Paginates the full GitHub commit history into a time-series JSON file for animated art generation.

Module

scripts/fetch_history.py

Shared HTTP helpers live in scripts/_github_http.py.

What it fetches

A paginated list of commits across the default branch, returning each commit's:

sha — commit hash
date — ISO 8601 timestamp
message — first line of commit message
additions / deletions — line change counts

Pagination uses a local _get(url, token) that returns (data, next_url) tuples and follows GitHub's Link: <...>; rel="next" headers until exhausted.

CLI

uv run python -m scripts.fetch_history \
  --owner wyattowalsh \
  --repo wyattowalsh \
  --output /tmp/history.json

Authentication

Same as fetch_metrics — GITHUB_TOKEN env var:

export GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_...

Output shape

[
  {
    "sha": "abc123",
    "date": "2026-03-17T12:00:00Z",
    "message": "feat: add ink garden",
    "additions": 200,
    "deletions": 10
  }
]

Usage in animated art

The history JSON is passed directly to animated_art.py:

uv run python -m scripts.cli generate animated \
  --history-path /tmp/history.json

The commit timestamps are used to compute daily activity density, which seeds the CSS animation parameters.

Animated Art

Uses history data as the entropy source for CSS animations

Fetch Metrics

Companion module for GitHub metrics collection