How can I view a git log of just one user's commits?

Question

When using git log, how can I filter by user so that I see only commits from that user?

Alcoholism

Is there a way to see the same thing directly on github? – Dissatisfied

To do this on github: https://mcmap.net/q/45141/-how-can-i-view-a-git-log-of-just-one-user-39-s-commits – Shrewd

Answer 1

This works for both git log and gitk - the 2 most common ways of viewing history.
You don't need to use the whole name:

git log --author="Jon"

will match a commit made by "Jonathan Smith"

git log --author=Jon

and

git log --author=Smith

would also work. The quotes are optional if you don't need any spaces.

Add --all if you intend to search all branches and not just the current commit's ancestors in your repo.

You can also easily match on multiple authors as regex is the underlying mechanism for this filter. So to list commits by Jonathan or Adam, you can do this:

git log --author="\(Adam\)\|\(Jon\)"

In order to exclude commits by a particular author or set of authors using regular expressions as noted in this question, you can use a negative lookahead in combination with the --perl-regexp switch:

git log --author='^(?!Adam|Jon).*$' --perl-regexp

Alternatively, you can exclude commits authored by Adam by using bash and piping:

git log --format='%H %an' | 
  grep -v Adam | 
  cut -d ' ' -f1 | 
  xargs -n1 git log -1

If you want to exclude commits commited (but not necessarily authored) by Adam, replace %an with %cn. More details about this are in my blog post here: http://dymitruk.com/blog/2012/07/18/filtering-by-author-name/

Aidaaidan

Is there a way to do the opposite? Say - I want to see all commits except for Jon's. – Famous

@Ian as for git help log "Jon" is a regular expression so it should be pretty easy – Jest

git log --format=%an | egrep -v 'Jon*' | xargs -n 1 git log -1 – Aidaaidan

oops.. forget that. but you get the gist. get a "not in" functionality out of piping through egrep -v and other tricks on the command line. – Aidaaidan

On my instance of git, I needed to add the -E flag to get the 'multiple user' example above to work. Wanted to make sure my experience isn't unique before I edit the answer – Superfetation

Is this command for the commits on the current branch only or is this for the entire project? How would be for the entire project? – Chavers

you would add --all to have log list commits from all branches instead of just current commit's ancestors. Git implicitly runs git log HEAD when you issue git log. – Aidaaidan

Any way to make gitk leave out the parent commits from other authors? (They are shown with white circles.) In contrast, git log --graph doesn't show the parent commits; it only shows the given author's commits. I would love to see the same output in gitk. (Already checked Preferences and Edit View - couldn't find anything useful.) – Disconnected

@IanRobinson Another way to exclude certain committers -- PERL regular expressions support "negative look-ahead assertions". So, you can construct an expression that requires that the starting point not match an expression that matches another regexp anywhere later in the string. Example, to exclude all author strings that contain 'Jon': git log --author='^(?!.*Jon)' --perl-regexp – Saddlebag

Oh, just noticed that a variation on that is further down in the original answer. Silly me :-) – Saddlebag

Beware this is case sensitive – Thigmotaxis

Add --no-merges if you want to exclude merge commits from that list. – Occasional

I note that the following syntax seems to work also: git log --author jeff (that is, no equal sign). – Neritic

Watch out for the quotation mark wrapping the pattern regex. Mine did not work since I used single quote(') instead of double quote ("). git log --author='^(?!.*Charith)' --perl-regexp did not work. git log --author="^(?!.*Charith)" --perl-regexp did work – Dildo

@ADTC: I asked separate question: #49220279 – Briscoe

Answer 2

git log --author="that user"

Retirement

How to make is exact seach? I don't want to see commits from "that user2" – Synergetic

it is all about proper naming in the system – Zelaya

Answer 3

On github there is also a secret way...

You can filter commits by author in the commit view by appending param ?author=github_handle. For example, the link https://github.com/dynjs/dynjs/commits/master?author=jingweno shows a list of commits to the Dynjs project

Sacha

any way to see across branches? something like commits/all ? – Araujo

How did you find this? What other flags are supported? – Peroxy

pro.mean's answer how to do this via the interface: https://mcmap.net/q/45141/-how-can-i-view-a-git-log-of-just-one-user-39-s-commits – Swatter

I don't prefer this answer because the question was related to a software and not related to a specific service. – Culley

Question was just how to view the git log - regardless of technology. So this answer fits the bill just fine. – Sacha

I find this a good answer this is helpful to some including me and withing the bounds of the question – Britain

Answer 4

git help log

gives you the manpage of git log. Search for "author" there by pressing / and then typing "author", followed by Enter. Type "n" a few times to get to the relevant section, which reveals:

git log --author="username"

as already suggested.

Note that this will give you the author of the commits, but in Git, the author can be someone different from the committer (for example in Linux kernel, if you submit a patch as an ordinary user, it might be committed by another administrative user.) See Difference between author and committer in Git? for more details)

Most of the time, what one refers to as the user is both the committer and the author though.

Emlin

@James I think your negativity here is unwarranted. I was simply trying to teach him how to look it up from the command line in case he forgets. I think you are mistaking me for a person who just says RTFM, but I included the answer in my response. – Emlin

It's not negativity. It's the fact that people come here asking for advice, and a lot of folks want to respond with some variant of RTFM. Bodes poorly for the community. – Orfurd

@Orfurd I have to agree with ustun here. He did answer the question, and he offered a strategy for finding the answer which is helpful for finding answers to other git-related questions. – Twostep

The reason there is a divergence of opinion here is because the statement, "Search for 'author' there" can be functionally replaced with "Use magic" as there is not a sensible reason to predict the keyword author over synonyms or abbreviations. Thus the perception of the RTFM response. – Dogooder

I don't think it's quite as black and white as this. Now, I agree with unstun that we ought to educate people how to do things for themselves - that's a good idea. Where unstun went slightly wrong is making the assumptions a) That the OP knows how to search a man page, and more importantly b) That the OP knows to search for 'author'. They may have searched for 'committer' or 'name' or something. – Phillada

@JohnHunt you are right, it had never occurred to me to explain what search means and how it is done at the time. Kind of assumed it. Fixing the text slightly. – Emlin

Answer 5

To pull more details - (Here %an refers to author)

Use this :-

git log --author="username" --pretty=format:"%h - %an, %ar : %s"

Monitory

And if you want their Email address use format %ae instead of %an (which gave Name.) – Elledge

--author actually searches by the author name and not committer name. I would change "username" to author – Mouthy

Syntax of commit fields available in --pretty=format – Nightspot

Answer 6

If you want to filter your own commits:

git log --author="<$(git config user.email)>"

Vacillation

It also works without the quotes and brackets (at least on git bash and ubuntu bash). – Clipclop

Filtering by an email address like here has the advantages that (1) it does not get confused by authors using various names on various computers, and (2) it prevents the issue that filtering by "authorname" will also show results for "authorname2" etc.. – Dameron

Answer 7

Since the other question was (possibly wrongfully so?) locked, I will just put this here:

show authors with their commit counts:

git shortlog -nse

find all commits for specific USERNAME:

git log --author=USERNAME --oneline --color=never | awk '{print $1}' | xargs git show

Tankard

Thanks, this was helpful. In case anybody else also wasn't getting any output for the xargs git show part, perhaps like me you need to add --color=never to the git log part (I forget that the color settings in my config sometimes mess other things up). – Sibie

Answer 8

cat | git log --author="authorName" > author_commits_details.txt

This gives your commits in text format.

Denominate

What is the purpose of the cat |? – Samuella

@KeithThompson To chase a mouse. – Ignazio

Answer 9

try this tool https://github.com/kamranahmedse/git-standup

Usage

$ git standup [-a <author name>] 
              [-w <weekstart-weekend>] 
              [-m <max-dir-depth>]
              [-f]
              [-L]
              [-d <days-ago>]
              [-D <date-format>] 
              [-g] 
              [-h]

Below is the description for each of the flags

- `-a`      - Specify author to restrict search to (name or email)
- `-w`      - Specify weekday range to limit search to (e.g. `git standup -w SUN-THU`)
- `-m`      - Specify the depth of recursive directory search
- `-L`      - Toggle inclusion of symbolic links in recursive directory search
- `-d`      - Specify the number of days back to include
- `-D`      - Specify the date format for "git log" (default: relative)
- `-h`      - Display the help screen
- `-g`      - Show if commit is GPG signed or not
- `-f`      - Fetch the latest commits beforehand

Froebel

Answer 10

You can even abbreviate this a bit by simply using part of the user name:

git log --author=mr  #if you're looking for mrfoobar's commits

Hooked

Answer 11

If using GitHub:

• go to branch
• click on commits

it will show list in below format

branch_x: < comment> 
author_name committed 2 days ago

• to see individual author's commit ; click on author_name and there you can see all the commit's of that author on that branch

Fingernail

That's a lot of clicks and assumes hosted git repo. Does not answer CLI as many above have done. – Hampshire

@Hampshire but it's useful information, especially as so many git projects are on GitHub! – Swatter

Answer 12

Show n number of logs for x user in colour by adding this little snippet in your .bashrc file.

gitlog() {
    if [ "$1" ] && [ "$2" ]; then
       git log --pretty=format:"%h%x09 %C(cyan)%an%x09 %Creset%ad%x09 %Cgreen%s" --date-order -n "$1" --author="$2"
    elif [ "$1" ]; then
       git log --pretty=format:"%h%x09 %C(cyan)%an%x09 %Creset%ad%x09 %Cgreen%s" --date-order -n "$1"
    else
        git log --pretty=format:"%h%x09 %C(cyan)%an%x09 %Creset%ad%x09 %Cgreen%s" --date-order
    fi
}

alias l=gitlog

To show the last 10 commits by Frank:

l 10 frank

To show the last 20 commits by anyone:

l 20

Leekgreen

Answer 13

Although, there are many useful answers. Whereas, just to add another way to it. You can also use

git shortlog --author="<author name>" --format="%h %s"

It will show the output in the grouped manner:

<Author Name> (5):
  4da3975f dependencies upgraded
  49172445 runtime dependencies resolved
  bff3e127 user-service, kratos, and guava dependencies upgraded
  414b6f1e dropwizard :- service, rmq and db-sharding depedencies upgraded
  a96af8d3 older dependecies removed

Here, total of 5 commits are done by <Author Name> under the current branch. Whereas, you can also use --all to enforce the search everywhere (all the branches) in the git repository.

One catch: git internally tries to match an input <author name> with the name and email of the author in the git database. It is case-sensitive.

Vedis

Answer 14

You can use either = or "space". For instance following two commands return the same

git log --author="Developer1"

git log --author "Developer1"

Capable

Answer 15

A possible alternative is using a tool called mergestat which lets you run SQL queries against the commit history in a repo (among other things).

mergestat "SELECT * FROM commits WHERE author_name LIKE '%Jon%'"

It's a bit more verbose but can offer flexibility in finding specifically what you're looking for in a generic way.

For instance, filtering out merge commits and only showing commits in the past year, from a specific author:

mergestat "SELECT * FROM commits WHERE author_name LIKE '%Jon%' WHERE author_when > DATE('now', '-1 year') AND parents < 2"

Full disclosure: I'm a maintainer of the project :)

Douma

Answer 16

My case: I'm using source tree, I followed the following steps:

1. Pressed CRL+3
2. Changed dropdown authors
3. Typed the name "Vinod Kumar"

Iman