Engineering Craft › Version Control (Git)

Log and History

Browsing and filtering commit history.

Also known as: git log, commit history, history

git log lists the commits in your history, newest first. It’s how you answer “what happened here, and when?”

git log                         # full entries (hash, author, date, message)
git log --oneline               # one line per commit
git log --oneline --graph --all # branches drawn as a graph
git log -5                      # last 5 commits
git log -p                      # include the diff of each commit

Filtering

git log --author="Ana"              # by author
git log --since="2 weeks ago"       # by date
git log --grep="login"              # message contains "login"
git log -- src/auth.py              # commits that touched this file
git log -S"retry_limit"             # commits that added or removed this exact text
git log main..feature               # commits on feature that aren't on main

-S is useful when you know a piece of code existed and want to find when it appeared or disappeared.

What to use it for

• Find when something changed, then read the commit message for the reason. This is where good commit messages pay off.
• Review what you’re about to push: git log origin/main..HEAD.
• Find the commit to undo, cherry-pick or compare. You need its hash.

To see who last changed each line of a file, use git blame. To hunt the commit that introduced a bug, see git bisect.

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