JIYIK CN >

Git is the most common, free and open source distributed version control system. It has repositories that play an important role in the Git world.

As a result of this feature of Git, repositories hold a huge significance in the life of developers; developers can look into the past and understand the commits made to a project through the functionality of Git, namely, commit history.

A commit is a snapshot of the files that we have completed by a developer during the lifecycle of a project. Each snapshot contains detailed information about the project.

Each file in a snapshot has its own unique identifier, a unique SHA-1 hash, specifically called a "blob". A tree specifies these blobs, and a commit specifies that tree.

Commit Hash

The commit hash is the long string of characters that follows the word commit. It may be called a Git commit reference or SHA.

This section will teach us how to view commits in different scenarios made while working on a project with team members.

How to view commit history

View a specific commit

We have to look at a particular commit if we get the hash string of a particular commit through Git's useful commands git show, which will show us the changes of that particular single commit.

The following is an example of the command.

$ git show 5eba8ab3b718a6ab6610186be934ba214e228a58

It's pretty quick to use commit hashes instead of specifying the whole big SHA, since all commit hashes are usually unique, so we can just use some starting letters/numbers and the result will be the same.

View a list of recent submissions

If we want to see the latest commit and view the latest details about our project, Git has a very smooth command for this situation that is very easy to use. We can say that with the help of the command git log, the commit history can be viewed in many ways.

$ git log

The command above will produce a chronological listing of the commits to date, showing the most recent commit as first, followed by older commits.

The output is as follows:

commit d240853866f20fc3e536cb3bca86c86c54b487ce
Author: test User <Test@user.media>
Date:   Fri Sept 12 11:44:39 2021 +0100

     commit for the first feature

With this, we will see all the details including the name of the developer, who made the commit, when the developer made it, and the developer’s email ID including the details of the message they entered while making the commit.

View commits that do not reference any branches or tags

git reflogChanges made to branch tips can be tracked via a special feature of Git . It is specifically related to local and has nothing to do with the repository.

It helps us to see any commit that is not assigned to any branch or is unnamed. We have seen that many Git commands have a parameter ref attached to them; this parameter stands for reference and is used to refer to commits.

The file reflog is located .git/logs/refs/heads/.in , and it mainly tracks the local commit history of a particular branch, excluding commits discarded by the git garbage collection process. It helps in recovering deleted branches and commits.

Here is the command we are talking about.

$ git log --reflog

Assume that <commit>all the targets of the reflogs declaration are mentioned in the specified command line shown as , i.e. git reflog, the above command will bring up all the git commits.