Git styled calendar with custom dates

Let us assume that you have a set of dates. You want to display these dates in a readable clear way.

For example like this:

So I have great info. It is one line of code, maybe two…

In this article I will show how to generate an image like these.

What do you need?

• jq - great toll for json / text processing
• node - js interpreter
• awk - text processor for selecting data

Installation

npm i -g cli-gh-cal

Preparing file with dates

We want to prepare a file with dates like these

2019-08-13
2018-05-19
2018-06-22
2019-04-16

Allow us to assume that you need to show dates of creation of files in your folder with photos. You can do it using the command

ls -l --time-style=long-iso . | awk '{print $6}' | sort > /tmp/dates.csv

Option --time-style allows showing dates in easy to the processing format. Next awk selects column with dates and sorted dates are saved in temporary file /tmp/dates.csv .

Displaying git styled calendar

Now if you want to display these dates, you need to type

cli-gh-cal --data "$(jq -R '[inputs | [.,1] ]' < /tmp/dates.csv)"

In this case, we put to work jq - powerful templater for json files. It allows replacing the list of dates to json string required by cli-gh-cal. After executing this command you should see an image similar to presented at the beginning.

Required packages

To work there, have to be installed node. I recommend installing it with nvm on the local machine.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-node-js-on-ubuntu-18-04

Next package - cli-gh-cal can be installed by npm - node packages manager

https://github.com/IonicaBizau/cli-gh-cal

Finally, you need also jq

https://stedolan.github.io/jq/download/

I hope you like this article. For me, it is a great example of how a small amount of code is needed to achieve great-looking results in data visualization today. Wow!

Screenshot from my console