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Version 2.51.0
▾
git-commit last updated in 2.55.0
NAME
git-commit - Record changes to the repository
SYNOPSIS
git commit [-a | --interactive | --patch] [-s] [-v] [-u[<mode>]] [--amend]
[--dry-run] <commit>_ | --fixup [(amend|reword):"><commit>]
[-F <file> | -m <msg>] [--reset-author] [--allow-empty]
[--allow-empty-message] [--no-verify] [-e] [--author=<author>]
[--date=<date>] [--cleanup=<mode>] [--[no-]status]
[-i | -o] [--pathspec-from-file=<file> [--pathspec-file-nul]]
[(--trailer <token>[(=|:)<value>])…] [-S[<keyid>]]
[--] [<pathspec>…]
DESCRIPTION
Create a new commit containing the current contents of the index and
the given log message describing the changes. The new commit is a
direct child of HEAD, usually the tip of the current branch, and the
branch is updated to point to it (unless no branch is associated with
the working tree, in which case HEAD is "detached" as described in
git-checkout[1]).
The content to be committed can be specified in several ways:
-
by using git-add[1] to incrementally "add" changes to the
index before using the commit command (Note: even modified files
must be "added");
-
by using git-rm[1] to remove files from the working tree
and the index, again before using the commit command;
-
by listing files as arguments to the commit command
(without --interactive or --patch switch), in which
case the commit will ignore changes staged in the index, and instead
record the current content of the listed files (which must already
be known to Git);
-
by using the -a switch with the commit command to automatically
"add" changes from all known files (i.e. all files that are already
listed in the index) and to automatically "rm" files in the index
that have been removed from the working tree, and then perform the
actual commit;
-
by using the --interactive or --patch switches with the commit command
to decide one by one which files or hunks should be part of the commit
in addition to contents in the index,
before finalizing the operation. See the “Interactive Mode” section of
git-add[1] to learn how to operate these modes.
The --dry-run option can be used to obtain a
summary of what is included by any of the above for the next
commit by giving the same set of parameters (options and paths).
If you make a commit and then find a mistake immediately after
that, you can recover from it with git reset.
OPTIONS
-a --all -
Automatically stage files that have
been modified and deleted, but new files you have not
told Git about are not affected.
-p --patch -
Use the interactive patch selection interface to choose
which changes to commit. See git-add[1] for
details.
-U<n> --unified=<n> -
Generate diffs with <n> lines of context. Defaults to diff.context
or 3 if the config option is unset.
--inter-hunk-context=<n> -
Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified <number>
of lines, thereby fusing hunks that are close to each other.
Defaults to diff.interHunkContext or 0 if the config option
is unset.
-C <commit> --reuse-message=<commit> -
Take an existing <commit> object, and reuse the log message
and the authorship information (including the timestamp)
when creating the commit.
-c <commit> --reedit-message=<commit> -
Like -C, but with -c the editor is invoked, so that
the user can further edit the commit message.
--fixup=[(amend|reword):]<commit> -
Create a new commit which "fixes up" <commit> when applied with
git rebase --autosquash. Plain --fixup=<commit> creates a
"fixup!" commit which changes the content of <commit> but leaves
its log message untouched. --fixup=amend:<commit> is similar but
creates an "amend!" commit which also replaces the log message of
<commit> with the log message of the "amend!" commit.
--fixup=reword:<commit> creates an "amend!" commit which
replaces the log message of <commit> with its own log message
but makes no changes to the content of <commit>.
The commit created by plain --fixup=<commit> has a title
composed of "fixup!" followed by the title of <commit>,
and is recognized specially by git rebase --autosquash. The -m
option may be used to supplement the log message of the created
commit, but the additional commentary will be thrown away once the
"fixup!" commit is squashed into <commit> by
git rebase --autosquash.
The commit created by --fixup=amend:<commit> is similar but its
title is instead prefixed with "amend!". The log message of
<commit> is copied into the log message of the "amend!" commit and
opened in an editor so it can be refined. When git rebase
--autosquash squashes the "amend!" commit into <commit>, the
log message of <commit> is replaced by the refined log message
from the "amend!" commit. It is an error for the "amend!" commit’s
log message to be empty unless --allow-empty-message is
specified.
--fixup=reword:<commit> is shorthand for --fixup=amend:<commit>
--only. It creates an "amend!" commit with only a log message
(ignoring any changes staged in the index). When squashed by git
rebase --autosquash, it replaces the log message of <commit>
without making any other changes.
Neither "fixup!" nor "amend!" commits change authorship of
<commit> when applied by git rebase --autosquash.
See git-rebase[1] for details.
--squash=<commit> -
Construct a commit message for use with git rebase --autosquash.
The commit message title is taken from the specified
commit with a prefix of "squash! ". Can be used with additional
commit message options (-m/-c/-C/-F). See
git-rebase[1] for details.
--reset-author -
When used with -C/-c/--amend options, or when committing after a
conflicting cherry-pick, declare that the authorship of the
resulting commit now belongs to the committer. This also renews
the author timestamp.
--short -
When doing a dry-run, give the output in the short-format. See
git-status[1] for details. Implies --dry-run.
--branch -
Show the branch and tracking info even in short-format.
--porcelain -
When doing a dry-run, give the output in a porcelain-ready
format. See git-status[1] for details. Implies
--dry-run.
--long -
When doing a dry-run, give the output in the long-format.
Implies --dry-run.
-z --null -
When showing short or porcelain status output, print the
filename verbatim and terminate the entries with NUL, instead of LF.
If no format is given, implies the --porcelain output format.
Without the -z option, filenames with "unusual" characters are
quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath
(see git-config[1]).
-F <file> --file=<file> -
Take the commit message from <file>. Use - to
read the message from the standard input.
--author=<author> -
Override the commit author. Specify an explicit author using the
standard A U Thor <[email protected]> format. Otherwise <author>
is assumed to be a pattern and is used to search for an existing
commit by that author (i.e. git rev-list --all -i --author=<author>);
the commit author is then copied from the first such commit found.
--date=<date> -
Override the author date used in the commit.
-m <msg> --message=<msg> -
Use <msg> as the commit message.
If multiple -m options are given, their values are
concatenated as separate paragraphs.
The -m option is mutually exclusive with -c, -C, and -F.
-t <file> --template=<file> -
When editing the commit message, start the editor with the
contents in <file>. The commit.template configuration
variable is often used to give this option implicitly to the
command. This mechanism can be used by projects that want to
guide participants with some hints on what to write in the message
in what order. If the user exits the editor without editing the
message, the commit is aborted. This has no effect when a message
is given by other means, e.g. with the -m or -F options.
-s --signoff --no-signoff -
Add a Signed-off-by trailer by the committer at the end of the commit
log message. The meaning of a signoff depends on the project
to which you’re committing. For example, it may certify that
the committer has the rights to submit the work under the
project’s license or agrees to some contributor representation,
such as a Developer Certificate of Origin.
(See https://developercertificate.org for the one used by the
Linux kernel and Git projects.) Consult the documentation or
leadership of the project to which you’re contributing to
understand how the signoffs are used in that project.
The --no-signoff option can be used to countermand an earlier --signoff
option on the command line.
--trailer <token>[(=|:)<value>] -
Specify a (<token>, <value>) pair that should be applied as a
trailer. (e.g. git commit --trailer "Signed-off-by:C O Mitter \
<[email protected]>" --trailer "Helped-by:C O Mitter \
<[email protected]>" will add the Signed-off-by trailer
and the Helped-by trailer to the commit message.)
The trailer.* configuration variables
(git-interpret-trailers[1]) can be used to define if
a duplicated trailer is omitted, where in the run of trailers
each trailer would appear, and other details.
-n --[no-]verify -
Bypass the pre-commit and commit-msg hooks.
See also githooks[5].
--allow-empty -
Usually recording a commit that has the exact same tree as its
sole parent commit is a mistake, and the command prevents you
from making such a commit. This option bypasses the safety, and
is primarily for use by foreign SCM interface scripts.
--allow-empty-message -
Create a commit with an empty commit message without using plumbing
commands like git-commit-tree[1]. Like --allow-empty, this
command is primarily for use by foreign SCM interface scripts.
--cleanup=<mode> -
Determine how the supplied commit message should be
cleaned up before committing. The <mode> can be strip,
whitespace, verbatim, scissors or default.
strip -
Strip leading and trailing empty lines, trailing whitespace,
commentary and collapse consecutive empty lines.
whitespace -
Same as strip except #commentary is not removed.
verbatim -
Do not change the message at all.
scissors -
Same as whitespace except that everything from (and including)
the line found below is truncated, if the message is to be edited.
"#" can be customized with core.commentChar.
# ------------------------ >8 ------------------------
default -
Same as strip if the message is to be edited.
Otherwise whitespace.
The default can be changed by the commit.cleanup configuration
variable (see git-config[1]).
-e --edit -
Let the user further edit the message taken from <file>
with -F <file>, command line with -m <message>, and
from <commit> with -C <commit>.
--no-edit -
Use the selected commit message without launching an editor.
For example, git commit --amend --no-edit amends a commit
without changing its commit message.
--amend -
Replace the tip of the current branch by creating a new
commit. The recorded tree is prepared as usual (including
the effect of the -i and -o options and explicit
pathspec), and the message from the original commit is used
as the starting point, instead of an empty message, when no
other message is specified from the command line via options
such as -m, -F, -c, etc. The new commit has the same
parents and author as the current one (the --reset-author
option can countermand this).
It is a rough equivalent for:
$ git reset --soft HEAD^
$ ... do something else to come up with the right tree ...
$ git commit -c ORIG_HEAD
but can be used to amend a merge commit.
You should understand the implications of rewriting history if you
amend a commit that has already been published. (See the "RECOVERING
FROM UPSTREAM REBASE" section in git-rebase[1].)
--no-post-rewrite -
Bypass the post-rewrite hook.
-i --include -
Before making a commit out of staged contents so far,
stage the contents of paths given on the command line
as well. This is usually not what you want unless you
are concluding a conflicted merge.
-o --only -
Make a commit by taking the updated working tree contents
of the paths specified on the
command line, disregarding any contents that have been
staged for other paths. This is the default mode of operation of
git commit if any paths are given on the command line,
in which case this option can be omitted.
If this option is specified together with --amend, then
no paths need to be specified, which can be used to amend
the last commit without committing changes that have
already been staged. If used together with --allow-empty
paths are also not required, and an empty commit will be created.
--pathspec-from-file=<file> -
Pass pathspec in <file> instead of commandline args. If
<file> is exactly - then standard input is used. Pathspec
elements are separated by LF or CR/LF. Pathspec elements can be
quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath
(see git-config[1]). See also --pathspec-file-nul and
global --literal-pathspecs.
--pathspec-file-nul -
Only meaningful with --pathspec-from-file. Pathspec elements are
separated with NUL character and all other characters are taken
literally (including newlines and quotes).
-u[<mode>] --untracked-files[=<mode>] -
Show untracked files.
The <mode> parameter is optional (defaults to all), and is used to
specify the handling of untracked files; when -u is not used, the
default is normal, i.e. show untracked files and directories.
The possible options are:
no -
Show no untracked files
normal -
Shows untracked files and directories
all -
Also shows individual files in untracked directories.
All usual spellings for Boolean value true are taken as normal
and false as no.
The default can be changed using the status.showUntrackedFiles
configuration variable documented in git-config[1].
-v --verbose -
Show unified diff between the HEAD commit and what
would be committed at the bottom of the commit message
template to help the user describe the commit by reminding
what changes the commit has.
Note that this diff output doesn’t have its
lines prefixed with #. This diff will not be a part
of the commit message. See the commit.verbose configuration
variable in git-config[1].
If specified twice, show in addition the unified diff between
what would be committed and the worktree files, i.e. the unstaged
changes to tracked files.
-q --quiet -
Suppress commit summary message.
--dry-run -
Do not create a commit, but show a list of paths that are
to be committed, paths with local changes that will be left
uncommitted and paths that are untracked.
--status -
Include the output of git-status[1] in the commit
message template when using an editor to prepare the commit
message. Defaults to on, but can be used to override
configuration variable commit.status.
--no-status -
Do not include the output of git-status[1] in the
commit message template when using an editor to prepare the
default commit message.
-S[<key-id>] --gpg-sign[=<key-id>] --no-gpg-sign -
GPG-sign commits. The <key-id> is optional and
defaults to the committer identity; if specified, it must be
stuck to the option without a space. --no-gpg-sign is useful to
countermand both commit.gpgSign configuration variable, and
earlier --gpg-sign.
-- -
Do not interpret any more arguments as options.
- <pathspec>...
-
When <pathspec> is given on the command line, commit the contents of
the files that match the pathspec without recording the changes
already added to the index. The contents of these files are also
staged for the next commit on top of what have been staged before.
EXAMPLES
When recording your own work, the contents of modified files in
your working tree are temporarily stored to a staging area
called the "index" with git add. A file can be
reverted back, only in the index but not in the working tree,
to that of the last commit with git restore --staged <file>,
which effectively reverts git add and prevents the changes to
this file from participating in the next commit. After building
the state to be committed incrementally with these commands,
git commit (without any pathname parameter) is used to record what
has been staged so far. This is the most basic form of the
command. An example:
$ edit hello.c
$ git rm goodbye.c
$ git add hello.c
$ git commit
Instead of staging files after each individual change, you can
tell git commit to notice the changes to the files whose
contents are tracked in
your working tree and do corresponding git add and git rm
for you. That is, this example does the same as the earlier
example if there is no other change in your working tree:
$ edit hello.c
$ rm goodbye.c
$ git commit -a
The command git commit -a first looks at your working tree,
notices that you have modified hello.c and removed goodbye.c,
and performs necessary git add and git rm for you.
After staging changes to many files, you can alter the order the
changes are recorded in, by giving pathnames to git commit.
When pathnames are given, the command makes a commit that
only records the changes made to the named paths:
$ edit hello.c hello.h
$ git add hello.c hello.h
$ edit Makefile
$ git commit Makefile
This makes a commit that records the modification to Makefile.
The changes staged for hello.c and hello.h are not included
in the resulting commit. However, their changes are not lost — they are still staged and merely held back. After the above
sequence, if you do:
this second commit would record the changes to hello.c and
hello.h as expected.
After a merge (initiated by git merge or git pull) stops
because of conflicts, cleanly merged
paths are already staged to be committed for you, and paths that
conflicted are left in unmerged state. You would have to first
check which paths are conflicting with git status
and after fixing them manually in your working tree, you would
stage the result as usual with git add:
$ git status | grep unmerged
unmerged: hello.c
$ edit hello.c
$ git add hello.c
After resolving conflicts and staging the result, git ls-files -u
would stop mentioning the conflicted path. When you are done,
run git commit to finally record the merge:
As with the case to record your own changes, you can use -a
option to save typing. One difference is that during a merge
resolution, you cannot use git commit with pathnames to
alter the order the changes are committed, because the merge
should be recorded as a single commit. In fact, the command
refuses to run when given pathnames (but see -i option).
COMMIT INFORMATION
Author and committer information is taken from the following environment
variables, if set:
-
GIT_AUTHOR_NAME
-
GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL
-
GIT_AUTHOR_DATE
-
GIT_COMMITTER_NAME
-
GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL
-
GIT_COMMITTER_DATE
(nb "<", ">" and "\n"s are stripped)
The author and committer names are by convention some form of a personal name
(that is, the name by which other humans refer to you), although Git does not
enforce or require any particular form. Arbitrary Unicode may be used, subject
to the constraints listed above. This name has no effect on authentication; for
that, see the credential.username variable in git-config[1].
In case (some of) these environment variables are not set, the information
is taken from the configuration items user.name and user.email, or, if not
present, the environment variable EMAIL, or, if that is not set,
system user name and the hostname used for outgoing mail (taken
from /etc/mailname and falling back to the fully qualified hostname when
that file does not exist).
The author.name and committer.name and their corresponding email options
override user.name and user.email if set and are overridden themselves by
the environment variables.
The typical usage is to set just the user.name and user.email variables;
the other options are provided for more complex use cases.
DATE FORMATS
The GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variables
support the following date formats:
- Git internal format
-
It is <unix-timestamp> <time-zone-offset>, where
<unix-timestamp> is the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch.
<time-zone-offset> is a positive or negative offset from UTC.
For example CET (which is 1 hour ahead of UTC) is +0100.
- RFC 2822
-
The standard date format as described by RFC 2822, for example
Thu, 07 Apr 2005 22:13:13 +0200.
- ISO 8601
-
Time and date specified by the ISO 8601 standard, for example
2005-04-07T22:13:13. The parser accepts a space instead of the
T character as well. Fractional parts of a second will be ignored,
for example 2005-04-07T22:13:13.019 will be treated as
2005-04-07T22:13:13.
|
Note
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In addition, the date part is accepted in the following formats:
YYYY.MM.DD, MM/DD/YYYY and DD.MM.YYYY.
|
In addition to recognizing all date formats above, the --date option
will also try to make sense of other, more human-centric date formats,
such as relative dates like "yesterday" or "last Friday at noon".
DISCUSSION
Though not required, it’s a good idea to begin the commit message
with a single short (no more than 50 characters) line summarizing the
change, followed by a blank line and then a more thorough description.
The text up to the first blank line in a commit message is treated
as the commit title, and that title is used throughout Git.
For example, git-format-patch[1] turns a commit into email, and it uses
the title on the Subject line and the rest of the commit in the body.
Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic.
-
The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequences
of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core
level.
-
Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. This
applies to tree objects, the index file, ref names, as well as
path names in command line arguments, environment variables
and config files (.git/config (see git-config[1]),
gitignore[5], gitattributes[5] and
gitmodules[5]).
Note that Git at the core level treats path names simply as
sequences of non-NUL bytes, there are no path name encoding
conversions (except on Mac and Windows). Therefore, using
non-ASCII path names will mostly work even on platforms and file
systems that use legacy extended ASCII encodings. However,
repositories created on such systems will not work properly on
UTF-8-based systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, Windows) and vice versa.
Additionally, many Git-based tools simply assume path names to
be UTF-8 and will fail to display other encodings correctly.
-
Commit log messages are typically encoded in UTF-8, but other
extended ASCII encodings are also supported. This includes
ISO-8859-x, CP125x and many others, but not UTF-16/32,
EBCDIC and CJK multi-byte encodings (GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5,
EUC-x, CP9xx etc.).
Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded
in UTF-8, both the core and Git Porcelain are designed not to
force UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular
project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, Git
does not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in
mind.
-
git commit and git commit-tree issue
a warning if the commit log message given to it does not look
like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your
project uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is to
have i18n.commitEncoding in .git/config file, like this:
[i18n]
commitEncoding = ISO-8859-1
Commit objects created with the above setting record the value
of i18n.commitEncoding in their encoding header. This is to
help other people who look at them later. Lack of this header
implies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8.
-
git log, git show, git blame and friends look at the
encoding header of a commit object, and try to re-code the
log message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can
specify the desired output encoding with
i18n.logOutputEncoding in .git/config file, like this:
[i18n]
logOutputEncoding = ISO-8859-1
If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of
i18n.commitEncoding is used instead.
Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log
message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit
object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a
reversible operation.
ENVIRONMENT AND CONFIGURATION VARIABLES
The editor used to edit the commit log message will be chosen from the
GIT_EDITOR environment variable, the core.editor configuration variable, the
VISUAL environment variable, or the EDITOR environment variable (in that
order). See git-var[1] for details.
Everything above this line in this section isn’t included from the
git-config[1] documentation. The content that follows is the
same as what’s found there:
commit.cleanup -
This setting overrides the default of the --cleanup option in
git commit. Changing the default can be useful
when you always want to keep lines that begin
with the comment character (core.commentChar, default #)
in your log message, in which case you
would do git config commit.cleanup whitespace (note that you will
have to remove the help lines that begin with the comment character
in the commit log template yourself, if you do this).
commit.gpgSign -
A boolean to specify whether all commits should be GPG signed.
Use of this option when doing operations such as rebase can
result in a large number of commits being signed. It may be
convenient to use an agent to avoid typing your GPG passphrase
several times.
commit.status -
A boolean to enable/disable inclusion of status information in the
commit message template when using an editor to prepare the commit
message. Defaults to true.
commit.template -
Specify the pathname of a file to use as the template for
new commit messages.
commit.verbose -
A boolean or int to specify the level of verbosity with git commit.
HOOKS
This command can run commit-msg, prepare-commit-msg, pre-commit,
post-commit and post-rewrite hooks. See githooks[5] for more
information.
FILES
$GIT_DIR/COMMIT_EDITMSG -
This file contains the commit message of a commit in progress.
If git commit exits due to an error before creating a commit,
any commit message that has been provided by the user (e.g., in
an editor session) will be available in this file, but will be
overwritten by the next invocation of git commit.
commit
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