Index / Git Basics / 2-3 Viewing the Commit History
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.
These examples use a very simple project called “simplegit”. To get the project, run
$ git clone https://github.com/schacon/simplegit-progit
When you run git log in this project, you should get output that looks something like this:
$ git log
commit ca82a6dff817ec66f44342007202690a93763949
Author: Scott Chacon <schacon@gee-mail.com>
Date: Mon Mar 17 21:52:11 2008 -0700
changed the version number
commit 085bb3bcb608e1e8451d4b2432f8ecbe6306e7e7
Author: Scott Chacon <schacon@gee-mail.com>
Date: Sat Mar 15 16:40:33 2008 -0700
removed unnecessary test
commit a11bef06a3f659402fe7563abf99ad00de2209e6
Author: Scott Chacon <schacon@gee-mail.com>
Date: Sat Mar 15 10:31:28 2008 -0700
first commit
By default, with no arguments, git log lists the commits made in that repository in reverse chronological order; that is, the most recent commits show up first. As you can see, this command lists each commit with its SHA-1 checksum, the author’s name and email, the date written, and the commit message.
A huge number and variety of options to the git log command are available to show you exactly what you’re looking for. Here, we’ll show you some of the most popular.
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