scratch/content/html/en/blog/2010-09-02-Use-git-to-calculate-trusted-mtimes.md

isHidden	menupriority	kind	created_at	title	author_name	author_uri	tags
false	1	article	2010-09-02T15:54:10+02:00	Use git to calculate trusted mtimes	Yann Esposito	yannesposito.com	nanoc web git

You can remark at the bottom of each page I provide a last modification date. This label was first calculated using the mtime of the file on the file system. But many times I modify this date just to force some recompilation. Therefore the date wasn't a date of real modification.

I use git to version my website. And fortunately I can know the last date of real change of a file. This is how I do this with nanoc:

def gitmtime filepath=@item.path.sub('/Scratch/','content/html/').sub(/\/$/,'') ext=%{.#{@item[:extension]}} filepath<<=ext if not FileTest.exists?(filepath) filepath.sub!(ext,%{/index#{ext}}) end str=`git log -1 --format='%ci' -- #{filepath}` if str.nil? or str.empty? return Time.now else return DateTime.parse( str ) end end

Of course I know it is really slow and absolutely not optimized. But it works as expected. Now the date you see at the bottom is exactly the date I modified the content of the page.

Thanks to Eric Sunshine to provide me some hints at cleaning my code. Je tiens à remercier Eric Sunshine pour ses conseils sur ce problème.