NAME¶
git-commit - Record changes to the repository
SYNOPSIS¶
git commit [-a | --interactive] [-s] [-v] [-u<mode>] [--amend] [--dry-run]
[(-c | -C) <commit>] [-F <file> | -m <msg>] [--reset-author]
[--allow-empty] [--no-verify] [-e] [--author=<author>]
[--date=<date>] [--cleanup=<mode>] [--status | --no-status] [--]
[[-i | -o ]<file>...]
DESCRIPTION¶
Stores the current contents of the index in a new commit along
with a log message from the user describing the changes.
The content to be added can be specified in several ways:
1.by using git add to incrementally
"add" changes to the index before using the commit command
(Note: even modified files must be "added");
2.by using git rm to remove files from the
working tree and the index, again before using the commit
command;
3.by listing files as arguments to the commit
command, 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);
4.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;
5.by using the --interactive switch with the
commit command to decide one by one which files should be part of the
commit, before finalizing the operation. Currently, this is done by invoking
git add --interactive.
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
Tell the command to automatically stage files that have
been modified and deleted, but new files you have not told git about are not
affected.
-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.
--reset-author
When used with -C/-c/--amend options, declare that the
authorship of the resulting commit now belongs of 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.
--porcelain
When doing a dry-run, give the output in a
porcelain-ready format. See
git-status(1) for details. Implies
--dry-run.
-z
When showing short or porcelain status output, terminate
entries in the status output with NUL, instead of LF. If no format is given,
implies the --porcelain output format.
-F <file>, --file=<file>
Take the commit message from the given file. Use -
to read the message from the standard input.
--author=<author>
Override the author name used in the commit. You can use
the standard A U Thor <author@example.com[1]> format. Otherwise,
an existing commit that matches the given string and its author name is
used.
--date=<date>
Override the author date used in the commit.
-m <msg>, --message=<msg>
Use the given <msg> as the commit message.
-t <file>, --template=<file>
Use the contents of the given file as the initial version
of the commit message. The editor is invoked and you can make subsequent
changes. If a message is specified using the -m or -F options, this option has
no effect. This overrides the commit.template configuration variable.
-s, --signoff
Add Signed-off-by line by the committer at the end of the
commit log message.
-n, --no-verify
This option bypasses 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.
--cleanup=<mode>
This option sets how the commit message is cleaned up.
The <mode> can be one of verbatim, whitespace,
strip, and default. The default mode will strip leading
and trailing empty lines and #commentary from the commit message only if the
message is to be edited. Otherwise only whitespace removed. The
verbatim mode does not change message at all, whitespace removes
just leading/trailing whitespace lines and strip removes both
whitespace and commentary.
-e, --edit
The message taken from file with -F, command line with
-m, and from file with -C are usually used as the commit log message
unmodified. This option lets you further edit the message taken from these
sources.
--amend
Used to amend the tip of the current branch. Prepare the
tree object you would want to replace the latest commit as usual (this
includes the usual -i/-o and explicit paths), and the commit log editor is
seeded with the commit message from the tip of the current branch. The commit
you create replaces the current tip — if it was a merge, it will have
the parents of the current tip as parents — so the current top commit
is discarded.
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).)
-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 only from the paths specified on the
command line, disregarding any contents that have been staged so far. 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.
-u[<mode>], --untracked-files[=<mode>]
Show untracked files (Default:
all).
The mode parameter is optional, and is used to specify the
handling of untracked files.
The possible options are:
• no - Show no untracked files
• normal - Shows untracked files and
directories
•
all - Also shows individual files in
untracked directories.
See git-config(1) for configuration variable used to change
the default for when the option is not specified.
-v, --verbose
Show unified diff between the HEAD commit and what would
be committed at the bottom of the commit message template. Note that this diff
output doesn’t have its lines prefixed with #.
-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.
--
Do not interpret any more arguments as options.
<file>...
When files are given on the command line, the command
commits the contents of the named files, without recording the changes already
staged. The contents of these files are also staged for the next commit on top
of what have been staged before.
The GIT_AUTHOR_DATE, GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variables and
the --date option support the following date formats:
Git internal format
It is <unix timestamp> <timezone offset>,
where <unix timestamp> is the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch.
<timezone offset> is a positive or negative offset from UTC. For example
CET (which is 2 hours ahead UTC) is +0200.
RFC 2822
The standard email 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.
Note
In addition, the date part is accepted in the following formats: YYYY.MM.DD,
MM/DD/YYYY and DD.MM.YYYY.
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
reset HEAD — <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).
DISCUSSION¶
Though not required, it’s a good idea to begin the commit
message with a single short (less than 50 character) line summarizing the
change, followed by a blank line and then a more thorough description. Tools
that turn commits into email, for example, use the first line on the
Subject: line and the rest of the commit in the body.
At the core level, git is character encoding agnostic.
•The pathnames recorded in the index and in the
tree objects are treated as uninterpreted sequences of non-NUL bytes. What
readdir(2) returns are what are recorded and compared with the data git keeps
track of, which in turn are expected to be what
lstat(2) and
creat(2) accepts.
There is no such thing as pathname encoding translation.
•The contents of the blob objects are
uninterpreted sequences of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core
level.
•The commit log messages are uninterpreted
sequences of non-NUL bytes.
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.
1.
git commit and
git commit-tree issues 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 its 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.
2.
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.
HOOKS¶
This command can run commit-msg, prepare-commit-msg, pre-commit,
and post-commit hooks. See githooks(5) for more information.
AUTHOR¶
Written by Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org[2]> and
Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com[3]>
NOTES¶
- 1.
- author@example.com
mailto:author@example.com
- 2.
- torvalds@osdl.org
mailto:torvalds@osdl.org
- 3.
- gitster@pobox.com
mailto:gitster@pobox.com