How do I get the Git commit count?

I'd like to get the number of commits of my Git repository, a bit like SVN revision numbers.

The goal is to use it as a unique, incrementing build number.

I currently do like that, on Unix/Cygwin/msysGit:

git log --pretty=format:'' | wc -l

But I feel it's a bit of a hack.

Is there a better way to do that? It would be cool if I actually didn't need wc or even Git, so it could work on a bare Windows. Just read a file or a directory structure...

To get a commit count for a revision (HEAD, master, a commit hash):

git rev-list --count <revision>

To get the commit count across all branches:

git rev-list --all --count

I recommend against using this for build identifier, but if you must, it's probably best to use the count for the branch you're building against. That way the same revision will always have the same number. If you use the count for all branches, activity on other branches could change the number.

git shortlog is one way.

This command returns count of commits grouped by committers:

git shortlog -s

Output:

14 John lennon
9  Janis Joplin

You may want to know that the -s argument is the contraction form of --summary.

git rev-list HEAD --count

git rev-list

git rev-list <commit> : List commits that are reachable by following the parent links from the given commit (in this case, HEAD).

--count : Print a number stating how many commits would have been listed, and suppress all other output.

If you’re looking for a unique and still quite readable identifier for commits, git describe might be just the thing for you.

U can just use :

git shortlog -s -n

Result :

 827  user one
    15  user two
     2  Gest 

You are not the first one to think about a "revision number" in Git, but 'wc' is quite dangerous, since commit can be erased or squashed, and the history revisited.

The "revision number" was especially important for Subversion since it was needed in case of merge (SVN1.5 and 1.6 have improved on that front).

You could end up with a pre-commit hook which would include a revision number in the comment, with an algorithm not involving looking up the all history of a branch to determine the correct number.

Bazaar actually came up with such an algorithm , and it may be a good starting point for what you want to do.

(As Bombe's answer points out, Git has actually an algorithm of its own, based on the latest tag, plus the number of commits, plus a bit of an SHA-1 key). You should see (and upvote) his answer if it works for you.

---

To illustrate Aaron's idea, you can also append the Git commit hash into an application’s "info" file you are distributing with your application.

That way, the about box would look like:

The applicative number is part of the commit, but the 'application’s "info" file' is generated during the packaging process, effectively linking an applicative build number to a technical revision id.

To get it into a variable, the easiest way is:

export GIT_REV_COUNT=`git rev-list --all --count`

A simple way is:

 git log --oneline | wc -l

oneline ensures that.

Git shortlog is one way to get the commit details:

git shortlog -s -n

This will give the number of commits followed by the author name. The -s option removes all the commit messages for each commit that the author made. Remove the same option if you would like to see the commit messages also. The -n option is used for sorting the entire list. Hope this helps.

If you're just using one branch, such as master, I think this would work great:

git rev-list --full-history --all | wc -l

This will only output a number. You can alias it to something like

git revno

to make things really convenient. To do so, edit your .git/config file and add this in:

[alias]
    revno = "!git rev-list --full-history --all | wc -l"

This will not work on Windows. I do not know the equivalent of "wc" for that OS, but writing a Python script to do the counting for you would be a multi-platform solution.

EDIT: Get count between two commits:

---

I was looking for an answer that would show how to get the number of commits between two arbitrary revisions and didn't see any.

git rev-list --count [older-commit]..[newer-commit]

There's a nice helper script that the Git folks use to help generate a useful version number based on Git describe. I show the script and explain it in my answer to How would you include the current commit id in a Git project's files?.

git rev-parse --short HEAD

The following command prints the total number of commits on the current branch.

git shortlog -s -n  | awk '{ sum += $1; } END { print sum; }' "$@"

It is made up of two parts:

1. Print the total logs number grouped by author (git shortlog -s -n)

   Example output

     1445  John C
     1398  Tom D
     1376  Chrsitopher P
      166  Justin T
      166  You
   

2. Sum up the total commit number of each author, i.e. the first argument of each line, and print the result out (awk '{ sum += $1; } END { print sum; }' "$@")

   Using the same example as above it will sum up 1445 + 1398 + 1376 + 166 + 166. Therefore the output will be:

     4,551
   

there are couple of cool methods to do so -

• First method

git shortlog -s

This command prints a list of commits count by all users who contributed to the repo.

956 Pankaj Tanwar
235 The Ninja
540 The Hardcore Geek
664 The Ever Shining Star
984 The Experienced Man

Simply, to get the count of total commits -

git shortlog -s | grep "Pankaj Tanwar"

it prints -

956 Pankaj Tanwar

• Another clean and cool method is -

git rev-list HEAD --author="Pankaj Tanwar" --count 

To calculate total lines of code contributed & total pull requests raised, check this blog

Generate a number during the build and write it to a file. Whenever you make a release, commit that file with the comment "Build 147" (or whatever the build number currently is). Don't commit the file during normal development. This way, you can easily map between build numbers and versions in Git.

In our company, we moved from SVN to Git. Lack of revision numbers was a big problem!

Do git svn clone, and then tag the last SVN commit by its SVN revision number:

export hr=`git svn find-rev HEAD`
git tag "$hr" -f HEAD

Then you can get the revision number with help of

git describe --tags --long

This command gives something like:

7603-3-g7f4610d

Means: The last tag is 7603 - it's the SVN revision. 3 - is count of commits from it. We need to add them.

So, the revision number can be counted by this script:

expr $(git describe --tags --long | cut -d '-' -f 1) + $(git describe --tags --long | cut -d '-' -f 2)

Using Bash syntax,

$(git rev-list --count HEAD)

looks fine for purely linear history. If you also want to sometimes have “numbers” from branches (based off master), consider:

$(git rev-list --count $(git merge-base master HEAD)).$(git rev-list --count ^master HEAD)

When run from a checkout of master, you get simply 1234.0 or the like. When run from a checkout of a branch you will get something like 1234.13, if there have been 13 commits made on that branch. Obviously this is useful only insofar as you are basing at most one branch off a given master revision.

--first-parent could be added to the micro number to suppress some commits arising only from merging other branches, though it is probably unnecessary.

The one I used to use was:

git log | grep "^commit" | wc -l

Simple but it worked.

You can try

git log --oneline | wc -l

or to list all the commits done by the people contributing in the repository

git shortlog -s

> git shortlog by itself does not address the original question of total number of commits (not grouped by author)

That is true, and git rev-list HEAD --count remains the simplest answer.

However, with Git 2.29 (Q4 2020), "git shortlog"^(man) has become more precise.
It has been taught to group commits by the contents of the trailer lines, like "Reviewed-by:", "Coauthored-by:", etc.

See commit 63d24fa, commit 56d5dde, commit 87abb96, commit f17b0b9, commit 47beb37, commit f0939a0, commit 92338c4 (27 Sep 2020), and commit 45d93eb (25 Sep 2020) by Jeff King (peff).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 2fa8aac, 04 Oct 2020)}

> ## shortlog: allow multiple groups to be specified
> ^{Signed-off-by: Jeff King}

> Now that shortlog supports reading from trailers, it can be useful to combine counts from multiple trailers, or between trailers and authors.
This can be done manually by post-processing the output from multiple runs, but it's non-trivial to make sure that each name/commit pair is counted only once.
> > This patch teaches shortlog to accept multiple --group options on the command line, and pull data from all of them.
> >That makes it possible to run:
> > git shortlog -ns --group=author --group=trailer:co-authored-by
> > to get a shortlog that counts authors and co-authors equally.
> > The implementation is mostly straightforward. The "group" enum becomes a bitfield, and the trailer key becomes a list.
I didn't bother implementing the multi-group semantics for reading from stdin. It would be possible to do, but the existing matching code makes it awkward, and I doubt anybody cares.
> > The duplicate suppression we used for trailers now covers authors and committers as well (though in non-trailer single-group mode we can skip the hash insertion and lookup, since we only see one value per commit).
> > There is one subtlety: we now care about the case when no group bit is set (in which case we default to showing the author).
The caller in builtin/log.c needs to be adapted to ask explicitly for authors, rather than relying on shortlog_init(). It would be possible with some gymnastics to make this keep working as-is, but it's not worth it for a single caller.

git shortlog now includes in its man page: > ## --group=<type> > > Group commits based on <type>. If no --group option is > specified, the default is author. <type> is one of: > > - author, commits are grouped by author > - committer, commits are grouped by committer (the same as -c) > > This is an alias for --group=committer.

git shortlog now also includes in its man page: > > If --group is specified multiple times, commits are counted under each > value (but again, only once per unique value in that commit). For > example, git shortlog --group=author --group=trailer:co-authored-by > counts both authors and co-authors.

git config --global alias.count 'rev-list --all --count'

If you add this to your config, you can just reference the command;

git count

How about making an alias ?

alias gc="git rev-list --all --count"      #Or whatever name you wish

Use git shortlog just like this

git shortlog -sn

Or create an alias (for ZSH based terminal)

# show contributors by commits alias gcall="git shortlog -sn"