Parse git log with PHP to an array

git_history.php

<?php
// Author: Ngo Minh Nam

$dir = "/path/to/your/repo/";
$output = array();
chdir($dir);
exec("git log",$output);
$history = array();
foreach($output as $line){
    if(strpos($line, 'commit')===0){
	if(!empty($commit)){
	    array_push($history, $commit);	
	    unset($commit);
	}
	$commit['hash']   = substr($line, strlen('commit'));
    }
    else if(strpos($line, 'Author')===0){
	$commit['author'] = substr($line, strlen('Author:'));
    }
    else if(strpos($line, 'Date')===0){
	$commit['date']   = substr($line, strlen('Date:'));
    }
    else{		
	$commit['message']  .= $line;
    }
}

print_r($history);

?>

Mine works perfect now: https://gist.github.com/jankal/70abaf5eb3df903e2ec6

This is probably a newb question and not exactly on topic: For Apache, I found I had to add the www-data user to the git group in order for the php page to read the repo (my bare repo has git:git for ownership). Having done that, there doesn't seem to be a security problem, like with someone accessing the repo files themselves via URL, because Apache's DocumentRoot is elsewhere and it therefore prevents that kind of access but I wanted to ask the group whether any part of what I described is a no-no or can be improved.

if you do a str_replace to remove any "\n"s in your commit message than the code looks alot cleaner.

function parseLog($log) {
    $history = array();
    foreach($log as $key => $line) {
        if(strpos($line, 'commit') === 0 || $key + 1 == count($lines)){
            $commit['hash'] = substr($line, strlen('commit') + 1);
        } else if(strpos($line, 'Author') === 0){
            $commit['author'] = substr($line, strlen('Author:') + 1);
        } else if(strpos($line, 'Date') === 0){
            $commit['date'] = substr($line, strlen('Date:') + 3);
        } elseif (strpos($line, 'Merge') === 0) {
            $commit['merge'] = substr($line, strlen('Merge:') + 1);
            $commit['merge'] = explode(' ', $commit['merge']);
        } else if(!empty($line)){
            $commit['message'] = substr($line, 4);
            array_push($history, $commit);  
            unset($commit);            
        }
    }
    return $history;
}