Viewing the commit history

This Post is part of a series about Git, Git concepts, commands and usage patterns to remind me and to help me learn. The first post of the series is Git - A New Years Resolution.

After you have created several commits, or if you have cloned a repository with an existing commit history, you’ll probably want to look back to see what has happened. The most basic and powerful tool to do this is the git log command.

When you run git log in your project, you should get output that looks something like this:

$ git log
commit ca82a6dff817ec66f44342007202690a93763949
Author: Martin Pickering <[email protected]>
Date:   Mon Mar 17 21:52:11 2008 -0700

    changed the version number

commit 085bb3bcb608e1e8451d4b2432f8ecbe6306e7e7
Author: Martin Pickering <[email protected]>
Date:   Sat Mar 15 16:40:33 2008 -0700

    removed unnecessary test

commit a11bef06a3f659402fe7563abf99ad00de2209e6
Author: Martin Pickering <[email protected]>
Date:   Sat Mar 15 10:31:28 2008 -0700

    first commit

By default (i.e. with no arguments), git log lists the commits made in that repository in reverse chronological order. There are huge number and variety of options to the git log command available to show you exactly what you’re looking for.

Last modified on 2018-01-06