Grouse

Like git diff, but for generated Hugo sites.

Imagine that, every time you pushed changes to your Hugo site, you also version-controlled the generated HTML/CSS/JS files. Then, when you were changing anything important on your site, you could also run git diff to see whether your changes had unintended side effects.

Grouse approximates that process by checking out previous commits, running Hugo on them, and then running git diff on the outputs.

Install

If you're on Mac OSX and have homebrew installed:

brew install capnfabs/tap/grouse

Otherwise, you can download the latest release for your platform directly from the releases page.

Usage

Quick reference

cd your-hugo-site
git log  # Should be a git repo.
# Show the difference between the generated output on these two commit references.
grouse commitRefA commitRefB

Specifying commits

Anything you can git diff against works as a commit reference for Grouse:

• hashes (e.g. 8c90155d4)
• branch names (e.g. feature/photo-albums)
• parent commits (e.g. HEAD^ - the previous commit)
• tags (v0.1)
• probably other things too!

Command-line flags

• grouse --tool runs git difftool instead of git diff
• Pass additional args to the Hugo builds with --buildargs
• Pass additional args to the git diff command with --diffargs

Usage tips

• grouse --diffargs="--stat" will give you a short list of which files have changed and how much they've changed by:

  $ grouse --diffargs="--stat" [default-branch]
  
  index.html                       |  4 ++++
  index.xml                        | 11 +++++++++-
  posts/index.xml                  | 11 +++++++++-
  posts/tawny-shoulders/index.html | 47 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
  sitemap.xml                      |  9 ++++++--
  5 files changed, 78 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

  This is a useful sanity-check before pushing new commits to production.

• Setting up a good diff tool will make the output of git diff much easier to work with. I recommend:

  • Kaleidoscope, which is paid, and OSX only, but really easy-to-use
  • Meld, which is free and cross-platform. It's especially good when used with --dir, i.e. grouse HEAD^ --tool --diffargs='--tool=meld --dir'.

Development instructions

Instructions for developers are in develop.md.

Not working / Questions / Comments?

Thanks for your feedback! File an issue or contact me.