git-commit(1) — Linux manual page
GIT-COMMIT(1) Git Manual GIT-COMMIT(1)
NAME
git-commit - Record changes to the repository
SYNOPSIS
git commit [-a | --interactive | --patch] [-s] [-v] [-u<mode>] [--amend]
[--dry-run] [(-c | -C | --squash) <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:
1. by using git-add(1) to incrementally "add" changes to the
index before using the commit command (Note: even modified
files must be "added");
2. by using git-rm(1) 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 (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);
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 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
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.
-p, --patch
Use the interactive patch selection interface to choose which
changes to commit. See git-add(1) for details.
-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 subject
composed of "fixup!" followed by the subject line from
<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 subject 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 rebase --autosquash.
The commit message subject line 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 the given 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 <author@example.com> format. Otherwise
<author> is assumed to be a pattern and is used to search for
an existing commit by that author (i.e. 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 the given <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 the given 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 \ <committer@example.com>" --trailer "Helped-by:C O
Mitter \ <committer@example.com>" 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
By default, the pre-commit and commit-msg hooks are run. When
any of --no-verify or -n is given, these are bypassed. 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
Like --allow-empty this command is primarily for use by
foreign SCM interface scripts. It allows you to create a
commit with an empty commit message without using plumbing
commands like git-commit-tree(1).
--cleanup=<mode>
This option determines 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
The message taken from file with -F, command line with -m,
and from commit object with -C are usually used as the commit
log message unmodified. This option lets you further edit the
message taken from these sources.
--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>
Pathspec is passed 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[<keyid>], --gpg-sign[=<keyid>], --no-gpg-sign
GPG-sign commits. The keyid argument 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.
For more details, see the pathspec entry in gitglossary(7).
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:
$ git commit
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:
$ git commit
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
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.
1. 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.
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.
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. See git-commit(1) for details. Changing the
default can be useful when you always want to keep lines that
begin with the comment character # 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 # 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. See git-commit(1).
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.
SEE ALSO
git-add(1), git-rm(1), git-mv(1), git-merge(1),
git-commit-tree(1)
GIT
Part of the git(1) suite
COLOPHON
This page is part of the git (Git distributed version control
system) project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨http://git-scm.com/⟩. If you have a bug report for this manual
page, see ⟨http://git-scm.com/community⟩. This page was obtained
from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/git/git.git⟩ on 2024-06-14. (At that time,
the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
repository was 2024-06-12.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
Git 2.45.2.492.gd63586 2024-06-12 GIT-COMMIT(1)
Pages that refer to this page: git(1), git-add(1), git-am(1), git-cherry-pick(1), git-commit(1), git-commit-tree(1), git-config(1), git-format-patch(1), git-interpret-trailers(1), git-merge(1), git-notes(1), git-pull(1), git-rebase(1), git-replace(1), git-reset(1), git-revert(1), git-stash(1), git-svn(1), stg-email(1), stg-repair(1), githooks(5), giteveryday(7)