git-commit(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | EXAMPLES | COMMIT INFORMATION | DATE FORMATS | DISCUSSION | ENVIRONMENT AND CONFIGURATION VARIABLES | HOOKS | FILES | SEE ALSO | GIT | COLOPHON

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

NAME         top

       git-commit - Record changes to the repository

SYNOPSIS         top

       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         top

       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         top

       -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         top

       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         top

       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         top

       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         top

       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         top

       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         top

       This command can run commit-msg, prepare-commit-msg, pre-commit,
       post-commit and post-rewrite hooks. See githooks(5) for more
       information.

FILES         top

       $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         top

       git-add(1), git-rm(1), git-mv(1), git-merge(1),
       git-commit-tree(1)

GIT         top

       Part of the git(1) suite

COLOPHON         top

       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,
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Git 2.45.2.492.gd63586         2024-06-12                  GIT-COMMIT(1)

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