git-commit - Record changes to the repository at Linux.org

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GIT-COMMIT(1) Git Manual GIT-COMMIT(1)

NAME
git-commit - Record changes to the repository

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 or --patch switches with the commit command to decide one by one which files or
hunks should be part of the commit, 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 chose 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.
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.

--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 a the long-format. Implies --dry-run.

-z, --null
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 commit author. Specify an explicit author using the standard A U Thor <[email protected]>
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.

-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
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.

whitespace
Same as strip except #commentary is not removed.

verbatim
Do not change the message at all.

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 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>]

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. 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.

-S[<keyid>], --gpg-sign[=<keyid>]
GPG-sign commit.

--
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.

DATE FORMATS
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.

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).

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.

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