NAME

git-commit - Record changes to the repository

SYNOPSIS

git commit [-a | --interactive | --patch] [-s] [-v] [-u<mode>] [--amend]
       [--dry-run] [(-c | -C | --fixup | --squash) <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] [-S[<keyid>]] [--] [<file>…​]

DESCRIPTION

Create a new commit containing the current contents of the index andthe given log message describing the changes. The new commit is adirect child of HEAD, usually the tip of the current branch, and thebranch is updated to point to it (unless no branch is associated withthe working tree, in which case HEAD is "detached" as described ingit-checkout[1]).

The content to be committed can be specified in several ways:

• by using git-add[1] to incrementally "add" changes to theindex before using the commit command (Note: even modified filesmust be "added");

• by using git-rm[1] to remove files from the working treeand the index, again before using the commit command;

• by listing files as arguments to the commit command(without —interactive or —patch switch), in whichcase the commit will ignore changes staged in the index, and insteadrecord the current content of the listed files (which must alreadybe known to Git);

• by using the -a switch with the commit command to automatically"add" changes from all known files (i.e. all files that are alreadylisted in the index) and to automatically "rm" files in the indexthat have been removed from the working tree, and then perform theactual commit;

• by using the —interactive or —patch switches with the commit commandto decide one by one which files or hunks should be part of the commitin addition to contents in the index,before finalizing the operation. See the “Interactive Mode” section ofgit-add[1] to learn how to operate these modes.

The —dry-run option can be used to obtain asummary of what is included by any of the above for the nextcommit by giving the same set of parameters (options and paths).

If you make a commit and then find a mistake immediately afterthat, you can recover from it with git reset.

OPTIONS

• -a
• —all

• Tell the command to automatically stage files that havebeen modified and deleted, but new files you have nottold Git about are not affected.

• -p

• —patch

• Use the interactive patch selection interface to chosewhich changes to commit. See git-add[1] fordetails.

• -C

• —reuse-message=

• Take an existing commit object, and reuse the log messageand the authorship information (including the timestamp)when creating the commit.

• -c

• —reedit-message=

• Like -C, but with -c the editor is invoked, so thatthe user can further edit the commit message.

• —fixup=

• Construct a commit message for use with rebase —autosquash.The commit message will be the subject line from the specifiedcommit with a prefix of "fixup! ". See git-rebase[1]for details.

• —squash=

• Construct a commit message for use with rebase —autosquash.The commit message subject line is taken from the specifiedcommit with a prefix of "squash! ". Can be used with additionalcommit message options (-m/-c/-C/-F). Seegit-rebase[1] for details.

• —reset-author

• When used with -C/-c/—amend options, or when committing after aconflicting cherry-pick, declare that the authorship of theresulting commit now belongs to the committer. This also renewsthe author timestamp.

• —short

• When doing a dry-run, give the output in the short-format. Seegit-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-readyformat. 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 thefilename 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 arequoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath(see git-config[1]).

• -F

• —file=

• Take the commit message from the given file. Use - toread the message from the standard input.

• —author=

• Override the commit author. Specify an explicit author using thestandard A U Thor <author@example.com> format. Otherwise is assumed to be a pattern and is used to search for an existingcommit by that author (i.e. rev-list —all -i —author=);the commit author is then copied from the first such commit found.

• —date=

• Override the author date used in the commit.

• -m

• —message=
• Use the given as the commit message.If multiple -m options are given, their values areconcatenated as separate paragraphs.

The -m option is mutually exclusive with -c, -C, and -F.

• -t
• —template=

• When editing the commit message, start the editor with thecontents in the given file. The commit.template configurationvariable is often used to give this option implicitly to thecommand. This mechanism can be used by projects that want toguide participants with some hints on what to write in the messagein what order. If the user exits the editor without editing themessage, the commit is aborted. This has no effect when a messageis 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 commitlog message. The meaning of a signoff depends on the project,but it typically certifies that committer hasthe rights to submit this work under the same license andagrees to a Developer Certificate of Origin(see http://developercertificate.org/ for more information).

• -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 itssole parent commit is a mistake, and the command prevents youfrom making such a commit. This option bypasses the safety, andis primarily for use by foreign SCM interface scripts.

• —allow-empty-message

• Like —allow-empty this command is primarily for use by foreignSCM interface scripts. It allows you to create a commit with anempty commit message without using plumbing commands likegit-commit-tree[1].

• —cleanup=

• This option determines how the supplied commit message should becleaned up before committing. The 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 configurationvariable (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 asthe commit log message unmodified. This option lets youfurther 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 commitwithout changing its commit message.

• —amend

• Replace the tip of the current branch by creating a newcommit. The recorded tree is prepared as usual (includingthe effect of the -i and -o options and explicitpathspec), and the message from the original commit is usedas the starting point, instead of an empty message, when noother message is specified from the command line via optionssuch as -m, -F, -c, etc. The new commit has the sameparents and author as the current one (the —reset-authoroption 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 youamend a commit that has already been published. (See the "RECOVERINGFROM 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 lineas well. This is usually not what you want unless youare concluding a conflicted merge.

• -o

• —only

• Make a commit by taking the updated working tree contentsof the paths specified on thecommand line, disregarding any contents that have beenstaged for other paths. This is the default mode of operation ofgit 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, thenno paths need to be specified, which can be used to amendthe last commit without committing changes that havealready been staged. If used together with —allow-emptypaths are also not required, and an empty commit will be created.

• -u[]

• —untracked-files[=]
• Show untracked files.

The mode parameter is optional (defaults to all), and is used tospecify the handling of untracked files; when -u is not used, thedefault 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.

The default can be changed using the status.showUntrackedFilesconfiguration variable documented in git-config[1].

• -v
• —verbose
• Show unified diff between the HEAD commit and whatwould be committed at the bottom of the commit messagetemplate to help the user describe the commit by remindingwhat changes the commit has.Note that this diff output doesn’t have itslines prefixed with #. This diff will not be a partof the commit message. See the commit.verbose configurationvariable in git-config[1].

If specified twice, show in addition the unified diff betweenwhat would be committed and the worktree files, i.e. the unstagedchanges to tracked files.

• -q
• —quiet

• Suppress commit summary message.

• —dry-run

• Do not create a commit, but show a list of paths that areto be committed, paths with local changes that will be leftuncommitted and paths that are untracked.

• —status

• Include the output of git-status[1] in the commitmessage template when using an editor to prepare the commitmessage. Defaults to on, but can be used to overrideconfiguration variable commit.status.

• —no-status

• Do not include the output of git-status[1] in thecommit message template when using an editor to prepare thedefault commit message.

• -S[]

• —gpg-sign[=]

• GPG-sign commits. The keyid argument is optional anddefaults to the committer identity; if specified, it must bestuck to the option without a space.

• —no-gpg-sign

• Countermand commit.gpgSign configuration variable that isset to force each and every commit to be signed.

• —

• Do not interpret any more arguments as options.

• …​

• When files are given on the command line, the commandcommits the contents of the named files, withoutrecording the changes already staged. The contents ofthese files are also staged for the next commit on topof what have been staged before.

DATE FORMATS

The GIT_AUTHOR_DATE, GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variablesand the —date optionsupport the following date formats:

• Git internal format

• It is <unix timestamp> <time zone offset>, where <unixtimestamp> 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 email format as described by RFC 2822, for exampleThu, 07 Apr 2005 22:13:13 +0200.

• ISO 8601

• Time and date specified by the ISO 8601 standard, for example2005-04-07T22:13:13. The parser accepts a space instead of theT character as well.

NoteIn 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 inyour working tree are temporarily stored to a staging areacalled the "index" with git add. A file can bereverted 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 tothis file from participating in the next commit. After buildingthe state to be committed incrementally with these commands,git commit (without any pathname parameter) is used to record whathas been staged so far. This is the most basic form of thecommand. An example:

$ edit hello.c
$ git rm goodbye.c
$ git add hello.c
$ git commit

Instead of staging files after each individual change, you cantell git commit to notice the changes to the files whosecontents are tracked inyour working tree and do corresponding git add and git rmfor you. That is, this example does the same as the earlierexample 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 thechanges are recorded in, by giving pathnames to git commit.When pathnames are given, the command makes a commit thatonly 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 includedin the resulting commit. However, their changes are not lost — they are still staged and merely held back. After the abovesequence, if you do:

$ git commit

this second commit would record the changes to hello.c andhello.h as expected.

After a merge (initiated by git merge or git pull) stopsbecause of conflicts, cleanly mergedpaths are already staged to be committed for you, and paths thatconflicted are left in unmerged state. You would have to firstcheck which paths are conflicting with git status_and after fixing them manually in your working tree, you wouldstage 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 -uwould 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 -aoption to save typing. One difference is that during a mergeresolution, you cannot use git commit with pathnames toalter the order the changes are committed, because the mergeshould be recorded as a single commit. In fact, the commandrefuses to run when given pathnames (but see -i option).

DISCUSSION

Though not required, it’s a good idea to begin the commit messagewith a single short (less than 50 character) line summarizing thechange, followed by a blank line and then a more thorough description.The text up to the first blank line in a commit message is treatedas the commit title, and that title is used throughout Git.For example, git-format-patch[1] turns a commit into email, and it usesthe 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 sequencesof bytes. There is no encoding translation at the corelevel.

• Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. Thisapplies to tree objects, the index file, ref names, as well aspath names in command line arguments, environment variablesand config files (.git/config (see git-config[1]),gitignore[5], gitattributes[5] andgitmodules[5]).

Note that Git at the core level treats path names simply assequences of non-NUL bytes, there are no path name encodingconversions (except on Mac and Windows). Therefore, usingnon-ASCII path names will mostly work even on platforms and filesystems that use legacy extended ASCII encodings. However,repositories created on such systems will not work properly onUTF-8-based systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, Windows) and vice versa.Additionally, many Git-based tools simply assume path names tobe UTF-8 and will fail to display other encodings correctly.

• Commit log messages are typically encoded in UTF-8, but otherextended ASCII encodings are also supported. This includesISO-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 encodedin UTF-8, both the core and Git Porcelain are designed not toforce UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particularproject find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, Gitdoes not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep inmind.

• git commit and git commit-tree issuesa warning if the commit log message given to it does not looklike a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say yourproject uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is tohave i18n.commitencoding in .git/config file, like this:

[i18n]
    commitEncoding = ISO-8859-1

Commit objects created with the above setting record the valueof i18n.commitEncoding in its encoding header. This is tohelp other people who look at them later. Lack of this headerimplies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8.

• git log, git show, git blame and friends look at theencoding header of a commit object, and try to re-code thelog message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You canspecify the desired output encoding withi18n.logOutputEncoding in .git/config file, like this:

[i18n]
    logOutputEncoding = ISO-8859-1

If you do not have this configuration variable, the value ofi18n.commitEncoding is used instead.

Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit logmessage when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commitobject level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily areversible operation.

ENVIRONMENT AND CONFIGURATION VARIABLES

The editor used to edit the commit log message will be chosen from theGIT_EDITOR environment variable, the core.editor configuration variable, theVISUAL environment variable, or the EDITOR environment variable (in thatorder). See git-var[1] for details.

HOOKS

This command can run commit-msg, prepare-commit-msg, pre-commit,post-commit and post-rewrite hooks. See githooks[5] for moreinformation.

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., inan editor session) will be available in this file, but will beoverwritten 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